Type-Directed Completion of Partial Expressions for API Discovery

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 2:40

Exploring unfamiliar APIs is often difficult and time-consuming as well as being a distraction from the flow of writing code. Part of the problem is due to inconsistent intuitions on naming of methods and the namespace hierarchy of the API. We propose a novel tool to allow users to easily perform type-directed searches of available APIs as an intuitive extension of existing IDE code completion interfaces. We also explore using type-directed search for finding methods and properties and for filling in method arguments. We present evidence that this tool would be significantly more effective than existing code completion at showing a user the method call they intended to make. (Joint work with Dan Grossman, Sumit Gulwani, and Tom Ball)