Similartech: Automatically Recommend Analogical Libraries Across Different Programming Languages

Third-party libraries are an integral part of many software projects. It often happens that developers need to find analogical libraries that can provide comparable features to the libraries they are already familiar with. Existing methods to find analogical libraries are limited by the community-curated list of libraries, blogs, or Q&A posts, which often contain overwhelming or out-of-date information. This paper presents our tool SimilarTech (https://graphofknowledge.appspot.com/similartech) that makes it possible to automatically recommend analogical libraries by incorporating tag embeddings and domain-specific relational and categorical knowledge mined from Stack Overflow. SimilarTech currently supports recommendation of 6,715 libraries across 6 different programming languages. We release our SimilarTech website for public use. The SimilarTech website attracts more than 2,400 users in the past 6 months. We observe two typical usage patterns of our website in the website visit logs which can satisfy different information needs of developers. The demo video can be seen at https://youtu.be/ubx8h4D4ieE.