Developing software projects that incorporate multiple languages has been a prevalent practice for many years. However, the issues encountered by developers during the development process, the underlying challenges causing these issues, and the solutions provided to developers remain unknown. In this paper, our objective is to provide answers to these questions by conducting a study on developer discussions on Stack Overflow (SO). Through a manual analysis of 586 highly relevant posts spanning 14 years, we revealed that multilingual development is a highly and sustainably active topic on SO, with older questions becoming inactive and newer ones getting first asked (and then mostly remaining active for more than one year). From these posts, we observed a diverse array of issues (11 categories), primarily centered around interfacing and data handling across different languages. Our analysis suggests that error/exception handling issues were the most difficult to resolve among those issue categories, while security related issues were most likely to receive an accepted answer. The primary challenge faced by developers was the complexity and diversity inherent in building multilingual code and ensuring interoperability. Additionally, developers often struggled due to a lack of technical expertise on the varied features of different programming languages (e.g., threading and memory management mechanisms). In addition, properly handling message passing across languages constituted a key challenge with using implicit language interfacing. Notably, Stack Overflow emerged as a crucial source of solutions to these challenges, with the majority (73%) of the posts receiving accepted answers, most within a week (36.5% within 24 hours and 25% in the following six days). Based on our analysis results, we have formulated actionable insights and recommendations that can be utilized by researchers and developers in this field.

中文翻译：

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多语言软件开发：问题、挑战和解决方案

开发包含多种语言的软件项目多年来一直是一种普遍的做法。但是，那开发者在开发过程中遇到的问题，底层导致这些问题的挑战，以及向开发人员提供的解决方案仍然未知。在本文中，我们的目标是通过对 Stack Overflow (SO) 上的开发人员讨论进行研究来回答这些问题。通过对 14 年中 586 个高度相关的帖子进行手动分析，我们发现多语言开发是 SO 上一个高度且持续活跃的主题，旧的问题变得不活跃，而新的问题首先被问到（然后大部分在一年多的时间内保持活跃） ）。从这些帖子中，我们观察到了一系列不同的问题（11 类），主要集中在不同语言之间的接口和数据处理。我们的分析表明，错误/异常处理问题是这些问题类别中最难解决的，而安全相关问题最有可能得到公认的答案。开发人员面临的主要挑战是构建多语言代码和确保互操作性所固有的复杂性和多样性。此外，由于缺乏对不同编程语言的各种功能（例如，线程和内存管理机制）的技术专业知识，开发人员常常陷入困境。此外，正确处理跨语言传递的消息构成了使用隐式语言接口的关键挑战。值得注意的是，Stack Overflow 成为解决这些挑战的重要来源，大多数 (73%) 的帖子都收到了接受的答案，大多数在一周内（36.5% 在 24 小时内，25% 在接下来的六天内）。根据我们的分析结果，我们制定了可供该领域的研究人员和开发人员使用的可行见解和建议。