Towards Analyzing N-language Polyglot Programs

2026-01-30

AI Summary

This work addresses the growing complexity of modern polyglot systems, which increasingly integrate three or more languages—such as JavaScript, WebAssembly, and Rust—posing significant challenges beyond the scope of existing program analysis techniques that primarily target bilingual settings. We present the first systematic formulation of the static analysis challenges inherent to N-language interoperability and introduce a scalable, language-agnostic analysis framework. Our approach leverages multilingual runtime environments like GraalVM to model cross-language interoperability semantics and integrates interprocedural control-flow and data-flow analyses across language boundaries. This yields a theoretical roadmap for static analysis of N-language programs, laying the foundation for general-purpose analysis tools and advancing the field from bilingual toward truly polyglot program analysis paradigms.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP
• Computer Vision: Language and Vision
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Representation Languages

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Multilingual and cross-lingual Web search
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Polyglot programming is gaining popularity as developers integrate multiple programming languages to harness their individual strengths. With the recent popularity of platforms like GraalVM and other multi-language runtimes, creating and managing these systems has become much more feasible. However, current research on analyzing multilingual programs mainly focuses on two languages, leaving out the increasing complexity of systems that use three or more. For example, modern web systems often link JavaScript, WebAssembly, and Rust within the same execution chain. This paper envisions the landscape of software systems with three-language polyglot communication. We identify fundamental challenges in analyzing them and propose a conceptual roadmap to advance static analysis techniques to address them. Our vision aims to stimulate discussion and inspire new research directions toward scalable, language-agnostic analysis frameworks for next-generation polyglot systems.

Problem

• polyglot programming
• multilingual programs
• static analysis
• multi-language systems
• software analysis

Innovation

• polyglot programming
• static analysis
• multi-language systems
• N-language analysis
• language-agnostic frameworks