How Do Java Programs Use Inheritance? An Empirical Study of Inheritance in Java Software

Tempero, Ewan; Noble, James; Melton, Hayden

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-70592-5_28

Cited by 49 publications

(48 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…We also found that when nominal types were as general as possible, they had very few members-one or two on average. This is in accordance with previous work which found that interfaces are generally smaller than classes [25]. Next, for a given nominal type, there were not many corresponding structural types (2.5 on average, a median of 1.2).…”

Section: Quantitative Resultssupporting

confidence: 92%

Is Structural Subtyping Useful? An Empirical Study

Malayeri

Aldrich

2009

Programming Languages and Systems

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Abstract. Structural subtyping is popular in research languages, but all mainstream object-oriented languages use nominal subtyping. Since languages with structural subtyping are not in widespread use, the empirical questions of whether and how structural subtyping is useful have thus far remained unanswered. This study aims to provide answers to these questions. We identified several criteria that are indicators that nominally typed programs could benefit from structural subtyping, and performed automated and manual analyses of open-source Java programs based on these criteria. Our results suggest that these programs could indeed be improved with the addition of structural subtyping. We hope this study will provide guidance for language designers who are considering use of this subtyping discipline.

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Section: Quantitative Resultssupporting

confidence: 92%

Is Structural Subtyping Useful? An Empirical Study

Malayeri

Aldrich

2009

Programming Languages and Systems

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“…Tempero [35] studied how fields are used in Java and reported that it is common for developers to declare non-private fields, but then not take advantage of that access. Tempero et al [36] found higher use of inheritance than expected and variation in the use of inheritance between interfaces and classes. Muschevici et al [26] studied multiple dispatch in several languages and compared its uses.…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 93%

Mining billions of AST nodes to study actual and potential usage of Java language features

Dyer

Rajan

Nguyen

et al. 2014

Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering

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Programming languages evolve over time, adding additional language features to simplify common tasks and make the language easier to use. For example, the Java Language Specification has four editions and is currently drafting a fifth. While the addition of language features is driven by an assumed need by the community (often with direct requests for such features), there is little empirical evidence demonstrating how these new features are adopted by developers once released. In this paper, we analyze over 31k opensource Java projects representing over 9 million Java files, which when parsed contain over 18 billion AST nodes. We analyze this corpus to find uses of new Java language features over time. Our study gives interesting insights, such as: there are millions of places features could potentially be used but weren't; developers convert existing code to use new features; and we found thousands of instances of potential resource handling bugs.

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“…We also tabulate the fact that a field f belongs to a class c. The translation is quadratic in the worst case. However, in practise, class hierarchies are never very deep [37]. The remaining atoms are static analysis dependent.…”

Section: Almost Effectively Propositional Logicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Result Certification of Static Program Analysers with Automated Theorem Provers

Besson

Cornilleau

Jensen

2014

Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments

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Abstract. The automation of the deductive approach to program verification crucially depends on the ability to efficiently infer and discharge program invariants. In an ideal world, user-provided invariants would be strengthened by incorporating the result of static analysers as untrusted annotations and discharged by automated theorem provers. However, the results of object-oriented analyses are heavily quantified and cannot be discharged, within reasonable time limits, by state-of-the-art automated theorem provers. In the present work, we investigate an original approach for verifying automatically and efficiently the result of certain classes of object-oriented static analyses using off-the-shelf automated theorem provers. We propose to generate verification conditions that are generic enough to capture, not a single, but a family of analyses which encompasses Java bytecode verification and Fähndrich and Leino typesystem for checking null pointers. For those analyses, we show how to generate tractable verification conditions that are still quantified but fall in a decidable logic fragment that is reducible to the Effectively Propositional logic. Our experiments confirm that such verification conditions are efficiently discharged by off-the-shelf automated theorem provers.

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How Do Java Programs Use Inheritance? An Empirical Study of Inheritance in Java Software

Cited by 49 publications

References 16 publications

Is Structural Subtyping Useful? An Empirical Study

Is Structural Subtyping Useful? An Empirical Study

Mining billions of AST nodes to study actual and potential usage of Java language features

Result Certification of Static Program Analysers with Automated Theorem Provers

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