Understanding Developers' Needs on Deprecation as a Language Feature

Deprecation is a language feature that allows API producers to mark a feature as obsolete. We aim to gain a deep understanding of the needs of API producers and consumers alike regarding deprecation. To that end, we investigate why API producers deprecate features, whether they remove deprecated features, how they expect consumers to react, and...

On the Reaction to Deprecation of 25,357 Clients of 4+1 Popular Java APIs

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are a tremendous resource—that is, when they are stable. Several studies have shown that this is unfortunately not the case. Of those, a large-scale study of API changes in the Pharo Smalltalk<br/>ecosystem documented several findings about API deprecations and their impact on API clients. We conduct a...