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ArchMigrate-Swift: A Compiler-in-the-Loop Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Objective-C-to-Swift Migration

Wenbin Shang, Jie-Si Yang, Guanyu Ding, Shiyu Yang
pp.275-285 DOI: 10.62051/khg1am73 August 13, 2026
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Abstract: Migrating Objective-C systems to Swift is not a token-level translation problem: API-name import rules, Foundation bridging, value semantics, optionality, collection behavior, and project-specific contracts interact with compiler constraints. This paper presents ArchMigrate-Swift, a compiler-in-the-loop, retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework that decomposes migration into schema retrieval, structural intent analysis, candidate generation, diagnostic repair, executable criticism, and evidence-based arbitration. The architecture is language-model agnostic; the released artifact instantiates every role deterministically so that the reported results do not depend on proprietary services or stochastic model drift. Because no established paired Objective-C–Swift benchmark with executable tests was identified, we introduce AMSwiftBench, a fixed-seed controlled benchmark containing 48 retrieval exemplars and 96 held-out Objective-C tasks spanning 12 migration families and eight lexical/structural difficulty modes. All generated Swift candidates are checked by Swift 6.2.1 and executed against public and hidden tests. In the controlled closed-schema setting, retrieval raises family identification from 94.8% to 100%; compiler repair raises compilation from 79.2% to 100%; and public-test-only arbitration raises end-to-end pass rate from 22.9% to 100%, at 190.3 ms amortized wall time per task. Exact McNemar analysis shows that the full system improves 63 of 96 tasks over retrieval plus compiler repair without regressions (p=2.17×10⁻¹⁹). These results establish the value of separating syntactic validity from semantic selection, while explicitly not claiming industrial end-to-end migration performance.
Keywords: Program migration; Objective-C; Swift; Compiler feedback; Retrieval-augmented generation; Multi-agent systems; Executable evaluation.
APA Citation: Wenbin Shang, Jie-Si Yang, Guanyu Ding, Shiyu Yang (2026). ArchMigrate-Swift: A Compiler-in-the-Loop Retrieval-Augmented Multi-Agent Framework for Objective-C-to-Swift Migration. Transactions on Computer Science and Intelligent Systems Research, 13(1), 275-285. https://doi.org/10.62051/khg1am73

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