Language Models for Code Completion: A Practical Evaluation
Maliheh Izadi Jonathan Katzy Tim van Dam Marc Otten Razvan Mihai Popescu Arie van Deursen
Transformer-based language models for automatic code completion have shown
great promise so far, yet the evaluation of these models rarely uses real data.
This study provides both quantitative and qualitative assessments of three
public code language models when completing real-world code. We first developed
an open-source IDE extension, Code4Me, for the online evaluation of the models.
We collected real auto-completion usage data for over a year from more than
1200 users, resulting in over 600K valid completions. These models were then
evaluated using six standard metrics across twelve programming languages. Next,
we conducted a qualitative study of 1690 real-world completion requests to
identify the reasons behind the poor model performance. A comparative analysis
of the models' performance in online and offline settings was also performed,
using benchmark synthetic datasets and two masking strategies. Our findings
suggest that while developers utilize code completion across various languages,
the best results are achieved for mainstream languages such as Python and Java.
InCoder outperformed the other models across all programming languages,
highlighting the significance of training data and objectives. Our study also
revealed that offline evaluations do not accurately reflect real-world
scenarios. Upon qualitative analysis of the model's predictions, we found that
66.3% of failures were due to the models' limitations, 24.4% occurred due to
inappropriate model usage in a development context, and 9.3% were valid
requests that developers overwrote. Given these findings, we propose several
strategies to overcome the current limitations. These include refining training
objectives, improving resilience to typographical errors, adopting hybrid
approaches, and enhancing implementations and usability.