Fusing Industry and Academia at GitHub (Experience Report)

TL;DR

This paper describes how GitHub's development of the Semantic program analysis tool was heavily influenced by academic research, demonstrating successful industry-academia collaboration in creating an industrial-scale code analysis system.

Contribution

It details the integration of academic research into the development of GitHub's Semantic tool, showcasing a practical example of industry-academia collaboration.

Findings

Academic research significantly informed Semantic's development.

Semantic enables detailed code analysis at industrial scale.

The paper highlights effective collaboration between industry and academia.

Abstract

GitHub hosts hundreds of millions of code repositories written in hundreds of different programming languages. In addition to its hosting services, GitHub provides data and insights into code, such as vulnerability analysis and code navigation, with which users can improve and understand their software development process. GitHub has built Semantic, a program analysis tool capable of parsing and extracting detailed information from source code. The development of Semantic has relied extensively on the functional programming literature; this paper describes how connections to academic research inspired and informed the development of an industrial-scale program analysis toolkit.