research-article

Predicting Program Properties from "Big Code"

Authors:

Veselin Raychev,

Andreas KrauseAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 50, Issue 1

Pages 111 - 124

https://doi.org/10.1145/2775051.2677009

Published: 14 January 2015 Publication History

Abstract

We present a new approach for predicting program properties from massive codebases (aka "Big Code"). Our approach first learns a probabilistic model from existing data and then uses this model to predict properties of new, unseen programs.

The key idea of our work is to transform the input program into a representation which allows us to phrase the problem of inferring program properties as structured prediction in machine learning. This formulation enables us to leverage powerful probabilistic graphical models such as conditional random fields (CRFs) in order to perform joint prediction of program properties.

As an example of our approach, we built a scalable prediction engine called JSNice for solving two kinds of problems in the context of JavaScript: predicting (syntactic) names of identifiers and predicting (semantic) type annotations of variables. Experimentally, JSNice predicts correct names for 63% of name identifiers and its type annotation predictions are correct in 81% of the cases. In the first week since its release, JSNice was used by more than 30,000 developers and in only few months has become a popular tool in the JavaScript developer community.

By formulating the problem of inferring program properties as structured prediction and showing how to perform both learning and inference in this context, our work opens up new possibilities for attacking a wide range of difficult problems in the context of "Big Code" including invariant generation, decompilation, synthesis and others.

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Cited By

Yang CChen JJiang JHuang Y(2024)Dependency-Aware Code NaturalnessProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36897948:OOPSLA2(2355-2377)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
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Information & Contributors

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Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 50, Issue 1

POPL '15

January 2015

682 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/2775051

Editor:
Andy Gill
University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS

Issue’s Table of Contents

POPL '15: Proceedings of the 42nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages
January 2015
716 pages
ISBN:9781450333009
DOI:10.1145/2676726
General Chair:
Sriram Rajamani
Microsoft Research, India
,
Program Chair:
David Walker
Princeton University, USA

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

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Publication History

Published: 14 January 2015

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 50, Issue 1

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Yang CChen JJiang JHuang Y(2024)Dependency-Aware Code NaturalnessProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36897948:OOPSLA2(2355-2377)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689794
Dutta AJannesari A(2024)MIREncoder: Multi-modal IR-based Pretrained Embeddings for Performance OptimizationsProceedings of the 2024 International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques10.1145/3656019.3676895(156-167)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3656019.3676895
Guo YChen ZChen LXu WLi YZhou YXu B(2024)Generating Python Type Annotations from Type Inference: How Far Are We?ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/365215333:5(1-38)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3652153
Zhang BRoychoudhury APaiva AAbreu RStorey M(2024)Towards Finding Accounting Errors in Smart ContractsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering10.1145/3597503.3639128(1-13)Online publication date: 20-May-2024
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Breyton GSaqib MFung BCharland P(2024)BETAC: Bidirectional Encoder Transformer for Assembly Code Function Name Recovery2024 20th International Conference on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks (DRCN)10.1109/DRCN60692.2024.10539155(1-8)Online publication date: 6-May-2024
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Sandoval Alcocer JCamacho-Jaimes HGalindo-Gutierrez GNeyem ABergel ADucasse S(2024)On the use of statistical machine translation for suggesting variable names for decompiled code: The Pharo caseJournal of Computer Languages10.1016/j.cola.2024.10127179(101271)Online publication date: Jun-2024
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Vagin ARomanov VIvanov V(2024)Evaluating Baselines for Type Inference: Static Code Analysis Versus Large Language ModelIntelligent Systems Design and Applications10.1007/978-3-031-64779-6_42(435-444)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2024
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