Finding Topic Distribution in Security Area of Swift Programming Language
摘要
In 2014, Apple Inc. released Swift as the new programming language for OS X and iOS environments. Swift is said to be incredibly fast and safe by design. In a very short time, Swift has become one of the most popular languages of the world. Apple has not released an official document stating the reason behind the launch of Swift, but it is speculated to be a move to attract more developers to the iOS platform. However, very little is known about the challenges faced by the developers while programming in Swift. Though there are some existing works on the broad topics of discussion, the domain related to security in the Swift programming language is completely unexplored. Knowing the most popular topics of discussion related to security in Swift can help the new app developers understand the latest trends in security in modern programming languages. In this paper, we bring out the major areas of discussion related to security in the Swift Programming language. We analyze the actual textual content of 100 manually selected security related questions in the developer discussion website, Stack Overflow to determine the most popular topics. We use Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a statistical topic modeling technique, to automatically discover the main topics present in the security questions. Our study uncovers the areas in Swift where the developers are facing problems in security related issues. According to our study, there are broadly three security-related topics of discussion among the developers. The results show that 43% questions are related to encryption, 29% of the questions are password related, while 28% of the questions are keychain related.