Facilitating the development of cross-platform software via automated code synthesis from web-based programming resources

In this paper, we present a novel approach-Native-2-Native-that uses program transformations performed on one platform to automatically synthesize equivalent code blocks to be used on another platform. When a programmer modifies the source version of an application, the changes are captured. Based on the changes, Native-2-Native identifies the semantic content of the source code block and formulates an appropriate query to search for the equivalent target code block using popular web-based programming resources. The discovered target code block is then presented to the programmer as an automatically synthesized target language source file for further fine-tuning and subsequent integration into the mobile application׳s target version. We evaluate the proposed method using common native resources, such as sensors, network access, and canonical data structures. We show that our approach can correctly synthesize more than 74% of iOS code from the provided Android source code and 91% of Android code from the provided iOS source code. The presented approach effectively automates the process of extracting the source code block׳s semantics and discovering existing target examples with the equivalent functionality, thus alleviating some of the most laborious and intellectually tiresome programming tasks in modern mobile development.