Classification of Language Interactions

Context: the presence of several languages interacting each other within the same project is an almost universal feature in software development. Earlier work shows that this interaction might be source of problems. Goal: we aim at identifying and characterizing the cross-language interactions at semantic level.% among artifacts written in different languages. Method: we took the commits of an open source project and analyzed the cross-language pairs of files occurring in the same commit to identify possible semantic interactions. We both defined a taxonomy and applied it. Result: we identify 6 categories of semantic interactions. The most common category is the one based on shared ids, the next is when an artifact provides a description of another artifact. Conclusions: the deeper knowledge of cross-language interactions represents the basis for implementing a tool supporting the management of this kind of interactions and the detection of related problems at compile time.