LAMBDAFICATOR: from imperative to functional programming through automated refactoring

  • Authors:

  • Lyle Franklin;Alex Gyori;Jan Lahoda;Danny Dig

  • Affiliations:

  • Ball State University, USA;Politehnica University of Timisoara, Romania;Oracle, Czech Republic;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Java 8 introduces two functional features: lambda expressions and functional operations like map or filter that apply a lambda expression over the elements of a Collection. Refactoring existing code to use these new features enables explicit but unobtrusive parallelism and makes the code more succinct. However, refactoring is tedious (it requires changing many lines of code) and error-prone (the programmer must reason about the control-flow, data-flow, and side-effects). Fortunately, these refactorings can be automated. We present LAMBDAFICATOR, a tool which automates two refactorings. The first refactoring converts anonymous inner classes to lambda expressions. The second refactoring converts for loops that iterate over Collections to functional operations that use lambda expressions. In 9 open-source projects we have applied these two refactorings 1263 and 1595 times, respectively. The results show that LAMBDAFICATOR is useful. A video highlighting the main features can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyAflgHVpU