A systematic review on Transpiler usage for Transaction-Oriented Applications

Context: For software product builders, when planning public-available transaction-oriented applications, a multi-platform and multi-programming-language software architecture design increase the flexibility, compatibility, and adoption probability, and establish the project ecosystem. Software architects are challenged to design a framework for developers to write the software only once, but obtaining various implementations of the same application, each one developed with a different programming language. A unique roadmap and different extension-methods are relevant to add allies, to reduce the cost of maintenance and for ease the upgrading. A transpiler is a tool that allows the translation of a source code to other programming languages, so it could be used for this objective. Objectives: To make a comprehensive literature review of the studies on transpiler implementations and usages for transaction-oriented applications to clearly identify current works in this topic and guide future work. Method: A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted. In total, of 550 collected papers, 170 primary studies were selected, reviewed, and analyzed.ResultsWe identified that the most common usages for transpilers are for translating sequential to parallel programming, GPU parallel execution optimizations and for compilation improvements. Conclusion: The transpilers have not been used previously for designing multi-platform transaction-oriented applications, opening this field for future research.