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How Do Developers Use the Java Stream API?

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Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2021 (ICCSA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 12955))

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Abstract

Java 8 marked a shift in the Java development landscape by introducing functional-like concepts in its stream library. Java developers can now rely on stream pipelines to simplify data processing, reduce verbosity, easily enable parallel processing and increase the expressiveness of their code. While streams have seemingly positive effects in Java development, little is known to what extent Java developers have incorporated streams into their programs and the degree of adoption by the Java community of individual stream’s features.

This paper presents a replication study on which we analyze the stream usage of 610 Java projects. Our findings show that the Java streams are used mostly by software libraries rather than regular applications. Developers rarely use parallel processing, and when they do so, they only superficially use parallelism features and most of the parallel streams are used on simple forEach operations. The most common used pipelines involve map, filter and collect operations. We carefully describe a number of stream idioms we identified, and detail how we addressed the challenges we faced to complete our study. Our findings will help developers at (i) making better decisions about which features to consider when improving the API and (ii) supporting stream-related IDEs features, such as refactoring.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/javaparser/javasymbolsolver.

  2. 2.

    It takes 28 h to process 7,700 Java source code files, and the 10k projects contain 317,032 source files.

  3. 3.

    mvn dependency: copy-dependencies and gradle dependencies.

  4. 4.

    https://bit.ly/2UPiGIO.

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Acknowledgments

Bergel thanks ANID Fondecyt 1200067 for partially sponsoring this work.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Ciencias Exactas e Ingenierías, Universidad Catolica Boliviana “San Pablo”, Cochabamba, Bolivia

    Joshua Nostas

  2. Department of Computer Science, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Juan Pablo Sandoval Alcocer

  3. Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

    Diego Elias Costa

  4. Department of Computer Science (DCC), University of Chile, Santiago, Chile

    Alexandre Bergel

Authors
  1. Joshua Nostas
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  2. Juan Pablo Sandoval Alcocer
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  3. Diego Elias Costa
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  4. Alexandre Bergel
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Perugia, Perugia, Italy

    Osvaldo Gervasi

  2. University of Basilicata, Potenza, Potenza, Italy

    Beniamino Murgante

  3. Covenant University, Ota, Nigeria

    Sanjay Misra

  4. University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Chiara Garau

  5. University of Cagliari, Cagliari, Italy

    Ivan Blečić

  6. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia

    David Taniar

  7. Kyushu Sangyo University, Fukuoka, Japan

    Bernady O. Apduhan

  8. University of Minho, Braga, Portugal

    Ana Maria A. C. Rocha

  9. Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Eufemia Tarantino

  10. Polytechnic University of Bari, Bari, Italy

    Carmelo Maria Torre

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Nostas, J., Alcocer, J.P.S., Costa, D.E., Bergel, A. (2021). How Do Developers Use the Java Stream API?. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2021. ICCSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12955. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87007-2_23

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-87007-2_23

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-87006-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-87007-2

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