Scaling Laws for Code: Every Programming Language Matters

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission8299 Authors

Keywords: scalinglaw, code, llm

Abstract:

Large language models (LLMs) are powerful but costly to train, with scaling laws predicting performance from model size, data, and compute.
However, different programming languages (PLs) have varying impacts during pre-training that significantly affect base model performance, leading to inaccurate performance prediction.
Existing works focus on language-agnostic settings, neglecting the inherently multilingual nature of modern software development.
Therefore, it is first necessary to investigate the scaling laws of different PLs, and then consider their mutual influences to arrive at the final multilingual scaling law.
In this paper, we present the first systematic exploration of scaling laws for multilingual code pre-training, conducting over 1000+ experiments (Equivalent to 336,000+ H800 hours) across multiple PLs, model sizes (0.2B to 14B parameters), and dataset sizes (1T tokens). We establish scaling laws for code LLMs across multiple programming languages, showing that interpreted languages benefit more from increased scale than compiled ones. Multilingual pre-training provides synergistic benefits, especially between syntactically similar languages, with parallel pairing (concatenating code with translations) significantly enhancing cross-lingual abilities. We propose a proportion-dependent multilingual scaling law that optimally allocates training tokens by prioritizing high-utility languages (e.g., Python), balancing high-synergy pairs (e.g., JavaScript-TypeScript), and reducing allocation to fast-saturating languages (e.g., Rust), achieving superior performance across all languages compared to uniform distribution.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Code Models

Research Area Keywords: Code Models;Multilingualism and Cross-Lingual NLP

Languages Studied: python,java,go,rust,c#,javascript,typescript

Submission Number: 8299