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Insynth: A system for code completion using types and weights
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Datum
2015
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Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.
Zusammenfassung
Developing modern software typically involves composing functionality from existing libraries. This task is difficult because libraries may expose many methods to the developer. To help developers in such scenarios, we present a technique that synthesizes and suggests valid expressions of a given type at a given program point. As the basis of our technique we use type inhabitation for lambda calculus terms in long normal form. We introduce a succinct representation for type judgements that merges types into equivalence classes to reduce the search space, then reconstructs any desired number of solutions on demand. Furthermore, we introduce a method to rank solutions based on weights derived from a corpus of code. We implemented the algorithm and deployed it as a plugin for the Eclipse IDE for Scala. We show that the techniques we incorporated greatly increase the effectiveness of the approach. Our evaluation benchmarks are code examples from programming practice; we make them available for future comparisons. The results presented here were published as a research paper at the ACM SIG- PLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI '13), Seattle, WA, USA, June 16-19, 2013. [GKKP13] This extended abstact also contains some excerpts from the original paper. InSynth - A System Overview Libraries are one of the biggest assets for today's software developers. Useful libraries often evolve into complex application programming interfaces (APIs) with a large number of classes and methods. It can be difficult for a developer to start using such APIs productively, even for simple tasks. Existing Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) help developers to use APIs by providing code completion functionality. For example, an IDE can offer a list of applicable members to a given receiver object, extracted by finding the declared type of the object. InSynth [GKP11, GKKP13] is a tool that automatically generates code snippets, similarly as in the case of auto-completion of code. By invoking InSynth, the user asks our tool to suggest a list of suitable code fragments for the given program point, as illustrated in 39 Fig. 1. InSynth displays a ranked list of suggested code snippets for that program point and the user can chose the best solution. To return meaningful snippets, and thus help a programmer, our tool synthesizes and suggests valid expressions of a given type in a short time (less than 0.5 sec). Figure 1: InSynth suggesting five highest-ranked well-typed expressions synthesized from declarations visible at a given program point Finding a code snippet of the right type is closely related to the type inhabitation problem, where we ask whether for a type environment and some calculus, there exists an inhabitant of a given type. As providing the correct answer fast is a very important requirement, we