Signatures of small-world and scale-free properties in large computer programs

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that large computer programs naturally form networks exhibiting small-world and scale-free properties, reflecting their growth and optimization processes, which are common in complex systems.

Contribution

It extends the understanding of network properties from physical systems to the internal structure of large computer programs, highlighting their scale-free and small-world characteristics.

Findings

Network shows power-law degree distribution

Program structure exhibits small-world properties

Features are likely universal in large software systems

Abstract

A large computer program is typically divided into many hundreds or even thousands of smaller units, whose logical connections define a network in a natural way. This network reflects the internal structure of the program, and defines the ``information flow'' within the program. We show that, (1) due to its growth in time this network displays a scale-free feature in that the probability of the number of links at a node obeys a power-law distribution, and (2) as a result of performance optimization of the program the network has a small-world structure. We believe that these features are generic for large computer programs. Our work extends the previous studies on growing networks, which have mostly been for physical networks, to the domain of computer software.