research-article

Using twinning to adapt programs to alternative APIs

Authors:

David NotkinAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '10: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1

Pages 205 - 214

https://doi.org/10.1145/1806799.1806832

Published: 01 May 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We describe twinning and its applications to adapting programs to alternative APIs. Twinning is a simple technique that allows programmers to specify a class of program changes, in the form of a mapping, without modifying the target program directly. Using twinning, programmers can specify changes that transition a program from using one API to using an alternative API.

We describe two related mapping-based source-to-source transformations. The first applies the mapping to a program, producing a copy with the changes applied. The second generates a new API that abstracts the changes specified in the mapping. Using this API, programmers can invoke either the old (replaced) code or the new (replacement) code through a single interface.

Managing program variants usually involves heavyweight tasks that can prevent the program from compiling for extended periods of time, as well as simultaneous maintenance of multiple implementations, which can make it easy to forget to add features or to fix bugs symmetrically. Our main contribution is to show that, at least in some common cases, the heavyweight work can be reduced and symmetric maintenance can be at least encouraged, and often enforced.

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641848
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cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '10: Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering - Volume 1

May 2010

627 pages

ISBN:9781605587196

DOI:10.1145/1806799

General Chairs:
Jeff Kramer
Imperial College, London, UK
,
Judith Bishop
Microsoft Research, Redmond
,
Program Chairs:
Prem Devanbu
University of California at Davis
,
Sebastian Uchitel
University of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Imperial College London, UK

Copyright © 2010 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 May 2010

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ICSE '10: 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 1 - 8, 2010

Cape Town, South Africa

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3641848
Weyssow MZhou XKim KLo DSahraoui HChandra SBlincoe KTonella P(2023)On the Usage of Continual Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Pre-trained Language Models of CodeProceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering10.1145/3611643.3616244(1470-1482)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3611643.3616244
Dilhara MDig DKetkar AGrundy JPollock LPenta M(2023)PyEvolve: Automating Frequent Code Changes in Python ML SystemsProceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00091(995-1007)Online publication date: 14-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ICSE48619.2023.00091
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