Type-Directed Completion of Partial Expressions for API Discovery

  • Daniel Perelman | University of Washington

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)

Speaker Details

Daniel is a graduate student at the University of Washington, working with Dan Grossman.

    • Portrait of Daniel Perelman

      Daniel Perelman

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running

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