A Survey of Multilanguage Interoperability and Its Program Analysis

Since multilanguage programming has the strength of interoperating languages with different features and paradigms, and it also enables the reuse of existing libraries, developers often use multilanguage interoperability in software systems of different application domains. Program analysis is an effective way to maintain the reliability and safety of software. However, numerous challenges appear when using program analysis to analyze multilanguage interoperability. However, there still lacks a systematic overview of the multilanguage interoperability and the corresponding program analysis (e.g., what are the research trends, how existing works solve them). To bridge this gap, we conducted a comprehensive investigation of the 195 research works related to multilanguage interoperability and its program analysis in the past 38 years (1987–2024). In this article, we classify these works into three categories with 10 research perspectives, including foreign interface design, interface definition and generation, intermediate representation (IR), semantics, static analysis of memory management, type system, exception handling and concurrency, dynamic analysis, and others. Then, we evaluate research trends that affect multilanguage interoperability and key static/dynamic language futures of multilanguage program analysis. Finally, we discuss the open challenges and future research directions of multilanguage interoperability.