Computer Science > Software Engineering
arXiv:2309.02894 (cs)
[Submitted on 6 Sep 2023 (v1), last revised 18 Sep 2023 (this version, v2)]
Title:A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Semantic Versioning in Golang Ecosystem
View a PDF of the paper titled A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Semantic Versioning in Golang Ecosystem, by Wenke Li and 3 other authors
View PDFAbstract:Third-party libraries (TPLs) have become an essential component of software, accelerating development and reducing maintenance costs. However, breaking changes often occur during the upgrades of TPLs and prevent client programs from moving forward. Semantic versioning (SemVer) has been applied to standardize the versions of releases according to compatibility, but not all releases follow SemVer compliance. Lots of work focuses on SemVer compliance in ecosystems such as Java and JavaScript beyond Golang (Go for short). Due to the lack of tools to detect breaking changes and dataset for Go, developers of TPLs do not know if breaking changes occur and affect client programs, and developers of client programs may hesitate to upgrade dependencies in terms of breaking changes.
To bridge this gap, we conduct the first large-scale empirical study in the Go ecosystem to study SemVer compliance in terms of breaking changes and their impact. In detail, we purpose GoSVI (Go Semantic Versioning Insight) to detect breaking changes and analyze their impact by resolving identifiers in client programs and comparing their types with breaking changes. Moreover, we collect the first large-scale Go dataset with a dependency graph from GitHub, including 124K TPLs and 532K client programs. Based on the dataset, our results show that 86.3% of library upgrades follow SemVer compliance and 28.6% of no-major upgrades introduce breaking changes. Furthermore, the tendency to comply with SemVer has improved over time from 63.7% in 2018/09 to 92.2% in 2023/03. Finally, we find 33.3% of downstream client programs may be affected by breaking changes. These findings provide developers and users of TPLs with valuable insights to help make decisions related to SemVer.
| Comments: | 11 pages, 4 figures. This paper has been accepted by ASE'23 |
| Subjects: | Software Engineering (cs.SE) |
| ACM classes: | K.6.3 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2309.02894 [cs.SE] |
| (orarXiv:2309.02894v2 [cs.SE] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2309.02894 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Wenke Li [view email][v1] Wed, 6 Sep 2023 10:33:00 UTC (1,422 KB)
[v2] Mon, 18 Sep 2023 02:07:59 UTC (1,422 KB)
Full-text links:
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- TeX Source
- Other Formats
View a PDF of the paper titled A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Semantic Versioning in Golang Ecosystem, by Wenke Li and 3 other authors
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Bibliographic Explorer(What is the Explorer?)
Connected Papers(What is Connected Papers?)
Litmaps(What is Litmaps?)
scite Smart Citations(What are Smart Citations?)
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
alphaXiv(What is alphaXiv?)
CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers(What is CatalyzeX?)
DagsHub(What is DagsHub?)
Gotit.pub(What is GotitPub?)
Hugging Face(What is Huggingface?)
Papers with Code(What is Papers with Code?)
ScienceCast(What is ScienceCast?)
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
Influence Flower(What are Influence Flowers?)
CORE Recommender(What is CORE?)
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community?Learn more about arXivLabs.