Understanding Resolution of Multi-Language Bugs: An Empirical Study on Apache Projects

TL;DR

This empirical study investigates multi-language bugs in Apache projects, revealing their prevalence, complexity, and causes, and highlighting the increased difficulty in resolving bugs involving multiple programming languages.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of multi-language bug resolution in open-source projects, identifying key characteristics, causes, and cross-language mechanisms involved.

Findings

MPL bugs constitute up to 42.26% of bugs in some projects.

Resolution of MPL bugs is more complex and takes longer than single-language bugs.

Reopen rate for bugs involving JavaScript and Python is notably high at 20.66%.

Abstract

Background: In modern software systems, more and more systems are written in multiple programming languages (PLs). There is no comprehensive investigation on the phenomenon of multi-programming-language (MPL) bugs, which resolution involves source files written in multiple PLs. Aim: This work investigated the characteristics of bug resolution in MPL software systems and explored the reasons why bug resolution involves multiple PLs. Method: We conducted an empirical study on 54 MPL projects selected from 655 Apache OSS projects, of which 66,932 bugs were analyzed. Results: (1) the percentage of MPL bugs (MPLBs) in the selected projects ranges from 0.17% to 42.26%, and the percentage of MPLBs for all projects as a whole is 10.01%; (2) 95.0% and 4.5% of all the MPLBs involve source files written in 2 and 3 PLs, respectively; (3) the change complexity resolution characteristics of MPLBs tend to be higher than those of single-programming-language bugs (SPLBs); (4) the open time for MPLBs is 19.52% to 529.57% significantly longer than SPLBs regarding 9 PL combinations; (5) the reopen rate of bugs involving the PL combination of JavaScript and Python reaches 20.66%; (6) we found 6 causes why the bug resolution involves multiple PLs and identified 5 cross-language calling mechanisms. Conclusion: MPLBs are related to increased development difficulty.