From Kotlin to Swift and Back: Toward Fully Automated Cross-Language Code Transpilation

Mobile platforms dominate software development, yet transpiling code between Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS) remains a major challenge. This task is essential for cross-platform accessibility, particularly when porting iOS apps to Android. Despite its importance, research on Kotlin-Swift transpilation and particularly, fixing these transpilation bugs is scarce. We thus present the first large-scale study of Kotlin-Swift transpilation bugs. We identify 149 real-world bugs, introduce a taxonomy of common bug types, and propose new mutation operators to address them. Combined with existing operators, our proposed operators have potential to fix 101 of these bugs. Building on the taxonomy of transpilation bugs and the mutation operators we develop to repair them, we lay out a research agenda for reliable, fully-automated, end-to-end software transpilation workflows for the mobile domain.

In International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Workshops (ASEW)