CAREER: Program Analysis and Transformations for Asynchrony

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Asynchronous programming is in demand today because responsiveness isimportant on all modern devices: desktop, mobile, or web. Asynchronousprogramming is especially important in mobile and wearable apps, whichare expected by 2016 to reach 300 billion downloads annually. Onecontemporary development task is refactoring long-running, blockingsynchronous code (e.g., accessing the web, database, or file system)into non-blocking asynchronous code. While major programming languagesmake asynchrony possible, they do not make it easy.This proposal aims to significantly enrich educational resources andprogrammers? toolset for adding, modernizing, tuning, and suggestingasynchrony. The PI plans to pursue research activities in four areas:(1) Mining and recommending refactorings; (2) Automated refactorings foradding asynchrony into mobile apps, for modernizing legacy asynchronouscode, and for converting between async variants; (3) Detecting andfixing async errors; (4) Extending async refactorings to other domains,with the intent of discovering theories and reusable principles.This project has the potential to revolutionize how mobile appprogrammers use asynchrony, to educate them about successful usage ofasynchrony, and to significantly reduce the cost and increase thequality of their code.