Today’s software systems are mostly developed in multiple languages (i.e., multi-language software), yet tool support for understanding and assuring these systems is rare. To facilitate future research on multi-language software engineering, this paper presents PolyFax, a toolkit that offers automated means for dataset collection from GitHub and two analysis utilities--a vulnerability-fixing commit categorization tool (VCC) and a language interfacing mechanism identification/categorization tool (LIC). The VCC tool immediately assists with assessing the vulnerability proneness of a given multi-language project based on its version histories, while the LIC tool enables dissection of the most important aspect of the construction of multi-language systems. Application of PolyFax to 7,113 multi-language projects with 12.6 million commits showed its practical usefulness in terms of promising efficiency and accuracy for studying multi-language software.

@inproceedings{paperbot7019,
  title = {PolyFax: a toolkit for characterizing multi-language software},
  author = {Wen Li and Li Li and Haipeng Cai},
  booktitle = {FSE},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.1145/3540250.3558925}
}