Related papers: Software refactoring and rewriting: from the persp…

In this short paper, we explore a new way to refactor a simple but tricky-to-parallelize tree-traversal algorithm to harness multicore parallelism. Crucially, the refactoring draws from some classic techniques from programming-languages…

Rewriting is a formalism widely used in computer science and mathematical logic. The classical formalism has been extended, in the context of functional languages, with an order over the rules and, in the context of rewrite based languages,…

Code super-optimization is the task of transforming any given program to a more efficient version while preserving its input-output behaviour. In some sense, it is similar to the paraphrase problem from natural language processing where the…

Although some recent works show potential complementarity among different state-of-the-art systems, few works try to investigate this problem in text summarization. Researchers in other areas commonly refer to the techniques of reranking or…

Refactoring is a well-known technique that is widely adopted by software engineers to improve the design and enable the evolution of a system. Knowing which refactoring operations were applied in a code change is a valuable information to…

Knowledge refactoring compresses a logic program by introducing new rules. Current approaches struggle to scale to large programs. To overcome this limitation, we introduce a constrained optimisation refactoring approach. Our first key idea…

Large language model (LLM) coding agents can generate working code, but their solutions often accumulate complexity, duplication, and architectural debt. Human developers address such issues through refactoring: behavior-preserving program…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for automated code refactoring tasks. Although these models can quickly refactor code, the quality may exhibit inconsistencies and unpredictable behavior. In this article, we systematically…

Block-based programming languages like Scratch have become increasingly popular as introductory languages for novices. These languages are intended to be used with a "tinkering" approach which allows learners and teachers to quickly…

While the recently emerged Microservices architectural style is widely discussed in literature, it is difficult to find clear guidance on the process of refactoring legacy applications. The importance of the topic is underpinned by high…

In collaborative software development, multiple contributors frequently change the source code in parallel to implement new features, fix bugs, refactor existing code, and make other changes. These simultaneous changes need to be merged…

To reduce the complexity of software, Developers manually simplify program (known as developer-induced program simplification in this paper) to reduce its code size yet preserving its functionality but manual simplification is…

Reducing the cognitive complexity of a piece of code to a given threshold is not trivial. Recently, we modeled software cognitive complexity reduction as an optimization problem and we proposed an approach to assist developers on this task.…

Initially developed for natural language processing (NLP), Transformers are now widely used for source code processing, due to the format similarity between source code and text. In contrast to natural language, source code is strictly…

Binary rewriting is a rapidly-maturing technique for modifying software for instrumentation, customization, optimization, and hardening without access to source code. Unfortunately, the practical applications of binary rewriting tools are…

Pragmas for loop transformations, such as unrolling, are implemented in most mainstream compilers. They are used by application programmers because of their ease of use compared to directly modifying the source code of the relevant loops.…

As software has become an integral part of scientific workflows, reproducible research practices must take it into account. In what way? Archiving source code is a necessary but insufficient condition. The ability to redeploy software…

Injection-based testing while refactoring is a pattern that minimizes the need for manual editing when altering the behaviour of a code base. Neither does it rely on a compilation or a linking process nor does it make assumptions on the…

Code reviews are popular in both industrial and open source projects. The benefits of code reviews are widely recognized and include better code quality and lower likelihood of introducing bugs. However, since code review is a manual…

Recent advances in coding agents have shown remarkable progress in software issue resolution. In practice, real-world issues are typically bug fixes or feature requests in which human developers naturally incorporate refactoring as part of…