User-driven Design and Evaluation of Liquid Types in Java

Abstract

Bugs that are detected earlier during the development lifecycle are easier and cheaper to fix, whereas bugs that are found during production are difficult and expensive to address, and may have dire consequences. Type systems are particularly effective at identifying and preventing bugs early in the development lifecycle by causing invalid programs to result in build failure. Liquid Types are more powerful than those found in mainstream programming languages, allowing the detection of more classes of bugs. However, while Liquid Types were proposed in 2008 with their integration in ML and subsequently introduced in C (2012), Javascript(2012) and Haskell(2014) through language extensions, they have yet to become widely adopted by mainstream developers. This paper investigates how Liquid Types can be integrated in a mainstream programming language, Java, by proposing a new design that aims to lower the barrier to entry and adapts to problems that Java developers commonly encounter at runtime. To promote accessibility, we conducted a series of developer surveys to design the syntax of LiquidJava, our prototype. To evaluate the prototype's usability, we conducted a user study of 30 Java developers, concluding that users intend to use LiquidJava and that it helped to find more bugs and debug faster.