RPCover: Recovering gRPC Dependency in Multilingual Projects

The advent of microservice architecture has led to a significant shift in the development of service-oriented software. In particular, the use of Remote Procedure Call (RPC), a mode of Inter-Process Communication (IPC) prevalent in microservices, has noticeably increased. To figure out the rela- tionships between services and obtain a high-level understanding of service-oriented software, a line of recent work focuses on the dynamic construction of service call graphs, which relies on the preliminary deployment of services and only captures the calling relationships within a specific time frame. Meanwhile, static methods avoid the need for pre-deployment and often provide a more stable and complete graph compared to dynamic techniques. However, research and practical applications of static call graph construction remain relatively unexplored.This paper introduces RPCover, a novel gRPC dependency recovery framework that facilitates the interconnection of ser- vices across various programming languages using their static gRPC calls. In addition, due to the lack of a multilingual microservice benchmark that uses gRPC, we build the first multilingual benchmark RPCoverBench that contains complex gRPC call relations. RPCover has been evaluated on a single language benchmark (DeathStarBench) and our multilingual benchmark (RPCoverBench). The results show that RPCover effectively recovers 99.33% of the use cases of gRPC calls with less than 200% of the overhead compared with a single-language semantic dependency analyzer.

In 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE Industry Challenge Track, Distinguished Papaer Award)