Abstract
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous resource-that is, when they are stable. Several studies have shown that this is unfortunately not the case. Of those, a large-scale study of API changes in the Pharo Smalltalk ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a partial replication of this study, considering more than 25,000 clients of five popular Java APIs on GitHub. This work addresses several shortcomings of the previous study, namely: a study of several distinct API clients in a popular, statically-typed language, with more accurate version information. We compare and contrast our findings with the previous study and highlight new ones, particularly on the API client update practices and the startling similarities between reaction behavior in Smalltalk and Java.
Sawant, Anand Ashok