Paper Info
Title
On the prevalence of function side effects in general purpose open source software systems.
Abstract
A study that examines the prevalence and distribution of function side effects in general-purpose software systems is presented. The study is conducted on 19 open source systems comprising over 9.8 Million lines of code (MLOC). Each system is analyzed and the number of function side effects is determined. The results show that global variables modification and parameters by reference are the most prevalent side effect types. Thus, conducting accurate program analysis or many adaptive changes processes (e.g., automatic parallelization to improve their parallelizability to better utilize multi-core architectures) becomes very costly or impractical to conduct. Analysis of the historical data over a 7-year period for 10 systems shows that there is a relatively large percentage of affected functions over the lifetime of the systems although trend is flat in general, thus posing further problems for inter-procedural analysis.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/978-3-319-33903-0_9
Studies in Computational Intelligence
Keywords
Field
DocType
Function side effects,Pass by reference,Function calls,Static analysis,Software evolution,Open source systems
Algorithm design,Computer science,Static analysis,Software system,Real-time computing,Program analysis,Software evolution,Source lines of code,Automatic parallelization,Global variable
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
654
1860-949X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
12
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
saleh m alnaeli163.30
Amanda D. Ali Taha200.68
Tyler Timm300.34