Exploring the Landscape of Programming Language Identification With Machine Learning Approaches

The increasing complexity of modern software development necessitates tools and methodologies for code analysis, maintenance, and migration in multi-language Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). The security needs of the software development process also recently led to the introduction of the Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), which vendors must include in their products. Automated tools become imperative to speed up software production and distribution. In the present code development landscape, automated Programming Language Identification (PLI) helps to develop secure software development with its in-depth insights into programming consequences for code maintenance, legacy system management, code analysis, quality assurance, software modernization, migration, and code search. With the increasing success of Machine Learning (ML) models in detection methods, researchers use them for PLI showing superior performance of detection compared to the basic method of identification based on the source file extension. In this paper, we present the first survey for ML-based PLI methods providing insights into the domain’s present status and guiding towards a futuristic tool development for PLI. We evaluate various ML techniques that recognize programming languages. These techniques include conventional, operation-based, and data source-based techniques. Our study examines the advantages and limitations of identifying the programming language in text, images, and videos. Our investigation also emphasizes the capabilities of the existing solutions that improve software development practices. Furthermore, our survey analyzes the strengths and limitations of existing code detection tools such as GitHub’s Linguist, Pygments, highlight.js, Ace, Google’s Code Prettify, SourcererCC, Guesslang, and SonarLint. We also provide some open research problems for future researchers.