Identification of promoted eclipse unstable interfaces using clone detection technique

TL;DR

This paper presents a clone detection-based approach to identify promoted unstable interfaces in the Eclipse framework, helping developers distinguish between stable APIs and non-APIs across multiple releases.

Contribution

It introduces a novel clone detection technique to identify promoted unstable interfaces in Eclipse, addressing a gap in supporting API users.

Findings

Over 60% of methods are non-APIs in each release.

Promoted non-APIs range from 0.20% to 10.38%.

The approach aids in identifying unstable interfaces for better API stability.

Abstract

The Eclipse framework is a popular and widely used framework that has been evolving for over a decade. The framework provides both stable interfaces (APIs) and unstable interfaces (non-APIs). Despite being discouraged by Eclipse, client developers often use non-APIs which may cause their systems to fail when ported to new framework releases. To overcome this problem, Eclipse interface producers may promote unstable interfaces to APIs. However, client developers have no assistance to aid them to identify the promoted unstable interfaces in the Eclipse framework. We aim to help API users identify promoted unstable interfaces. We used the clone detection technique to identify promoted unstable interfaces as the framework evolves. Our empirical investigation on 16 Eclipse major releases presents the following observations. First, we have discovered that there exists over 60% non-API methods of the total interfaces in each of the analyzed 16 Eclipse releases. Second, we have discovered that the percentage of promoted non-APIs identified through clone detection ranges from 0.20% to 10.38%.