Chameleon: The Gist of Dynamic Programming Languages

摘要

Dynamic programming languages, such as JavaScript and PHP, are widespread and heavily used. They provide very useful "dynamic" features, like run-time type inference, dynamic method calls, and built-in dynamic data structures. This makes it hard to build static analyzers, for automatic errors discovery. Yet, exploiting harmful behaviors in such programs, especially in web applications, can have significant impacts. In this paper, we present Chameleon, a core programming language summarizing the main features of the dynamic programming paradigm. Chameleon can be useful in defining, testing and comparing static analyses, aiming at preventing bugs and errors in programs written in dynamic programming languages. With Chameleon, static analysis experts could define and test control mechanisms without the burden to take in consideration the technical details characterizing a specific real-world programming language.