A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Semantic Versioning in Golang Ecosystem

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 st...

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Vydáno v:IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering : [proceedings] s. 1604 - 1614
Hlavní autoři: Li, Wenke, Wu, Feng, Fu, Cai, Zhou, Fan
Médium: Konferenční příspěvek
Jazyk:angličtina
Vydáno: IEEE 11.09.2023
Témata:
Breaking Change
Costs
Ecosystems
Go Ecosystem
Java
Libraries
Maintenance engineering
Mining Software Repositories
Semantic Versioning
Semantics
Third-Party Library
Time-frequency analysis
ISSN:2643-1572
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Shrnutí: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 propose 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.
ISSN:2643-1572
DOI:10.1109/ASE56229.2023.00140