Lifting the curse of stringly-typed code
preprint
OA: closed
CC-BY-4.0
AI-generated summary
This study mined JavaScript source files to identify structured languages embedded within string literals and developed a static analyzer to detect and fix this common practice.
One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works
Abstract
How often do JavaScript programmers embed structured languages into strings literals? We conduct an empirical investigating mining nearly 500 thousand JavaScript source files from almost ten thousand repositories from GitHub. We parsed each string literal with seven separate common grammars, and found the most common data type that is hidden within the confines of string literals. To reduce the overuse of strings for structured data types, we present a simple static program analyzer that finds embedded languages and warns the developer, providing an optional fix.
My notes (saved in your browser only)
Citation neighborhood (no data yet)
We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. The paper's references may be in our DB but unresolved to ``paper_id`` (resolution happens at ingest when the cited DOI matches a row we already have). Run the cross-source citation reconcile pass to retry.
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-19T01:45:01.086888+00:00
- unpaywall
- last seen: 2026-06-05T02:00:03.366016+00:00
License: CC-BY-4.0