9th International Conference on ICT for Sustainable Development

Authors - Md. Shahrukh Ansari, Salman Abdul Moiz
Abstract - In software development, it’s common to employ multiple programming languages within a single project, known as multilingual development. While this approach offers significant advantages such as legacy integration and performance optimization, integrating code from different languages can introduce code smells that negatively impact the overall readability, maintainability, and performance of the systems. These issues are known as multi-language code smells, and although several studies have identified various code and design smells related to multi-language systems, the catalog of these smells is not exhaustive. This paper introduces two new code smells, namely, Language Envy and Cross-Responsibility Declaration, for multi-language systems. It also proposes a mechanism to detect these smells and evaluates their presence in open-source projects. The results indicate that 9% of non-native methods, which call a native method, exhibit the Language Envy code smell, while 37% of the classes that declare at least one native method suffer from the Cross-Responsibility Declaration code smell.