Research

In grad school, I studied software engineering to help become better at writing software.

I focused on build systems because I find them to be a big pain, but a big pain that’s absolutely worth it if done right. Usually you either spend too much time figuring out the build system at the start when there’s more important stuff to work on, or you end up wasting more time later on and getting frustrated with a poor build system that’s slow and occasionally fails to incorporate your latest changes. But when you have a great build system that instantly reflects all your source code changes in a running system, and gathers warnings and errors in an easy-to-remedy way—programming is just so much easier and more fun.

Master’s Thesis

Building programs that use multiple programming languages is more complicated than the normal single-language case. By studying multilanguage build systems, what can we learn about build systems in general?

By comparing the build systems of a sample of different multilanguage software packages, I found a set of common techniques for causing and solving build problems, and a possible explanation for why previous quantitative work has found that centralizing responsibility for the build system reduces overall build maintenance.

Because build systems are seen as secondary and relatively unimportant, people don’t usually focus on them. They reuse design decisions and abstractions from the application domain in the build system. The build system for Python is Pythonic and build systems for CORBA-based software use CORBA patterns. This phenomenon is beneficial if the application domain is systems-type software with the emphasis on correctness that build systems require, but if the application domain is something else, this phenomenon is likely to result in lower-quality builds. You can counter this by having specific build experts who work primarily on the build system, rather than sharing responsibility for the build system among all developers.

Downloads

• Thesis, 121 pages, 1.2MB
• Presentation, 83 slides, 3.5MB

Citation

Andrew Neitsch. Build System Issues in Multilanguage Software, Master’s thesis, University of Alberta, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10402/era.28641

ICSM paper

The major results of my master’s thesis were published at the 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance in 2012.

Downloads

• Paper, 10 pages, 192KB
• Presentation, 29 slides, 1.1MB

Build diagram of one of the case studies, p. 62

Summary slide from presentation

Abstract

Building software from source is often viewed as a “solved problem” by software engineers, as there are many mature, well-known tools and techniques. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that these tools often do not effectively address the complexities of building multilanguage software. To investigate this apparent problem, we have performed a qualitative study on a set of five multilanguage open source software packages. Surprisingly, we found build system problems that prevented us from building many of these packages out-of-the-box.

Our key finding is that there are commonalities among build problems that can be systematically addressed. In this paper, we describe the results of this exploratory study, identify a set of common build patterns and anti-patterns, and outline research directions for improving the build process. One such finding is that multilanguage packages avoid certain build problems by supporting compilation-free extension. As well, we find evidence that concerns from the application and implementation domains may “leak” into the build model, with both positive and negative effects on the resulting build systems.

Citation

Andrew Neitsch, Kenny Wong, and Michael W. Godfrey. “Build System Issues in Multilanguage Software”, Proceedings of the 2012 28th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM 2012), Riva del Garda, Trento, Italy, September 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10.1109/ICSM.2012.6405265