The task of generating code from a natural language description, or NL2Code, is considered a pressing and significant challenge in code intelligence. Thanks to the rapid development of pre-training techniques, surging large language models are being proposed for code, sparking the advances in NL2Code. To facilitate further research and applications in this field, in this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of 27 existing large language models for NL2Code, and also review benchmarks and metrics. We provide an intuitive comparison of all existing models on the HumanEval benchmark. Through in-depth observation and analysis, we provide some insights and conclude that the key factors contributing to the success of large language models for NL2Code are “Large Size, Premium Data, Expert Tuning”. In addition, we discuss challenges and opportunities regarding the gap between models and humans. We also create a website https://nl2code.github.io to track the latest progress through crowd-sourcing. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first survey of large language models for NL2Code, and we believe it will contribute to the ongoing development of the field.

With the rapid development of pre-training techniques, a number of language models have been pre-trained on large-scale code corpora and perform well in code generation. In this paper, we investigate how to equip pre-trained language models with the ability of code generation for private libraries. In practice, it is common for programmers to write code using private libraries. However, this is a challenge for language models since they have never seen private APIs during training. Motivated by the fact that private libraries usually come with elaborate API documentation, we propose a novel framework with two modules: the APIRetriever finds useful APIs, and then the APICoder generates code using these APIs. For APIRetriever, we present a dense retrieval system and also design a friendly interaction to involve uses. For APICoder, we can directly use off-the-shelf language models, or continually pre-train the base model on a code corpus containing API information. Both modules are trained with data from public libraries and can be generalized to private ones. Furthermore, we craft three benchmarks for private libraries, named TorchDataEval, MonkeyEval, and BeatNumEval. Experimental results demonstrate the impressive performance of our framework.