Polyglot Code Refactoring Tools

Modern polyglot applications often require refactoring across languages such as Java, Kotlin, Swift, Objective-C, Go, and TypeScript, making simple text-search tools insufficient for tasks like stale feature-flag removal. Cross-language changes can cause cascading rewrites, including replacing method calls, simplifying boolean expressions, removing redundant conditionals and unreachable code, deleting unused parameters, and cleaning imports; although compilers may eliminate dead code in generated output, leaving it in source code increases technical debt and maintenance costs. The discussion argues that AST-based tools are preferable to build-system-based approaches because they can provide lightweight, syntax-level, reusable cleanup rules without separate implementations for each language. It highlights Uber’s PolyglotPiranha, alongside Meta’s Codemod and Semgrep, as a cross-language rewrite tool that represents refactorings as ordered match-and-replace rule graphs and iteratively applies rules until no further changes are possible. PolyglotPiranha supports 10 languages, is built on tree-sitter, and aims to automate large-scale migrations, dependency updates, security fixes, and deep code cleanup while allowing many rules to be shared across related languages.

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