Automated Refactoring to Reactive Programming

Reactive programming languages and libraries, such as ReactiveX, have been shown to significantly improve software design and have seen important industrial adoption over the last years. Asynchronous applications – which are notoriously error-prone to implement and to maintain – greatly benefit from reactive programming because they can be defined in a declarative style, which improves code clarity and extensibility. In this paper, we tackle the problem of refactoring existing code bases that are designed using traditional abstractions for asynchronous programming. We propose 2Rx, a refactoring tool to automatically convert asynchronous code to reactive programming. Our evaluation on top-starred GitHub projects shows that 2Rx is effective with the most common asynchronous constructs, covering ~94.7% of the projects with asynchronous computations, and it can provide a refactoring for ~91.7% of their occurrences