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Adoption and use of Java generics

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Abstract

Support for generic programming was added to the Java language in 2004, representing perhaps the most significant change to one of the most widely used programming languages today. Researchers and language designers anticipated this addition would relieve many long-standing problems plaguing developers, but surprisingly, no one has yet measured how generics have been adopted and used in practice. In this paper, we report on the first empirical investigation into how Java generics have been integrated into open source software by automatically mining the history of 40 popular open source Java programs, traversing more than 650 million lines of code in the process. We evaluate five hypotheses and research questions about how Java developers use generics. For example, our results suggest that generics sometimes reduce the number of type casts and that generics are usually adopted by a single champion in a project, rather than all committers. We also offer insights into why some features may be adopted sooner and others features may be held back.

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Notes

  1. http://download.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/guide/language/generics.html

  2. Due to potential changes as the paper evolves, the complete data set will be on the PROMISE site by the final version of the paper and the correct URL to that data set will appear in that version of the paper.

  3. http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=37183

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to NCSU students Brad Herrin, Donghoon Kim, Michael Kolbas, and Chris Suich, who contributed code to our analysis framework. Thanks to Jonathan Aldrich, Andrew Black, Prem Devanbu, Mike Ernst, Ron Garcia, Gail Murphy, Zhendong Su, and Thomas Zimmerman, who provided valuable advice.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30332, USA

    Chris Parnin

  2. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, 98052, USA

    Christian Bird

  3. Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, 27695, USA

    Emerson Murphy-Hill

Authors
  1. Chris Parnin
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  2. Christian Bird
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  3. Emerson Murphy-Hill
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Emerson Murphy-Hill.

Additional information

Communicated by Arie van Deursen, Tao Xie, and Thomas Zimmermann

Appendices

Errata

In the MSR paper on which this paper is based (Parnin et al. 2011), we made three mistakes that have been corrected in this article. Because of these corrections, the results in this paper supersede the results from the MSR paper. We highlight the corrections here.

First, our time series analysis of casts versus generics undercounted the number of casts and generics. The time series appears in Fig. 5, along with a corrected correlation analysis (Section 6.1). This change reverses our original conclusion, which originally stated that generics do not have a strong influence on casts in a project.

Second, we originally miscounted the number of generic language features due to two bugs in our analysis software. The corrected numbers and graphs appear throughout this paper. The corrected numbers and graphs do not change our original conclusions because the shape of the data remains nearly identical.

Third, our original example of a generic method declaration in Section 2.2 was not correctly typed code. The new example is correctly typed.

Appendix

In this Appendix, we show extended figures for all projects.

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Cast versus generic density in established projects

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Cast versus generic density in recent projects

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Usage of raw and generic types in established projects

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Usage of raw and generic types in recent projects

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Contributors’ introduction and removal of parameterized types over time in established projects

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Contributors’ introduction and removal of parameterized types over time in recent projects

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Contributors’ introduction and removal of annotations over time in established projects

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Fig. 17
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Contributors’ introduction and removal of annotations over time in recent projects

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Parnin, C., Bird, C. & Murphy-Hill, E. Adoption and use of Java generics. Empir Software Eng 18, 1047–1089 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-012-9236-6

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