Modular architecture for code and metadata sharing

Abstract

Every fragment of code we write has dependencies and associated metadata. Code dependencies range from local references and standard library definitions to external third party libraries. Metadata spans from within source code files (hierarchical names and code comments) to external files and database servers (package-level dependency configurations, build and test results, code reviews etc.). This scattered storage and non-uniform access limits our programming environments in their functionality and extensibility. In this paper, we propose a modular system architecture, Haknam, better suited for code and related metadata sharing. Haknam precisely tracks code interdependencies, allows flexible naming and querying of code references, and collects code fragments and their related metadata as messages in a distributed log-centric pipeline. We argue that this setting brings considerable advantages. In particular, we focus on modular development of tools and services that can assist in programming-related tasks. Every new functionality can be simply added by creating and processing messages from the distributed pipeline.