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Assessing programming language impact on development and maintenance: a study on c and c++

Authors:

Pamela Bhattacharya,

Iulian NeamtiuAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 171 - 180

https://doi.org/10.1145/1985793.1985817

Published: 21 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Billions of dollars are spent every year for building and maintaining software. To reduce these costs we must identify the key factors that lead to better software and more productive development. One such key factor, and the focus of our paper, is the choice of programming language. Existing studies that analyze the impact of choice of programming language suffer from several deficiencies with respect to methodology and the applications they consider. For example, they consider applications built by different teams in different languages, hence fail to control for developer competence, or they consider small-sized, infrequently-used, short-lived projects. We propose a novel methodology which controls for development process and developer competence, and quantifies how the choice of programming language impacts software quality and developer productivity. We conduct a study and statistical analysis on a set of long-lived, widely-used, open source projects - Firefox, Blender, VLC, and MySQL. The key novelties of our study are: (1) we only consider projects which have considerable portions of development in two languages, C and C++, and (2) a majority of developers in these projects contribute to both C and C++ code bases. We found that using C++ instead of C results in improved software quality and reduced maintenance effort, and that code bases are shifting from C to C++. Our methodology lays a solid foundation for future studies on comparative advantages of particular programming languages.

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Gordillo ACalero CMoraga MGarcía FFernandes JAbreu RSaraiva J(2024)Programming languages ranking based on energy measurementsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09690-432:4(1539-1580)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4
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Index Terms

Assessing programming language impact on development and maintenance: a study on c and c++
1. Social and professional topics
  1. Professional topics
    1. Management of computing and information systems
      1. Project and people management
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Software verification and validation
      1. Empirical software validation
  2. Software organization and properties
    1. Software functional properties
      1. Formal methods

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '11: Proceedings of the 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2011

1258 pages

ISBN:9781450304450

DOI:10.1145/1985793

General Chair:
Richard N. Taylor
UC Irvine, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Harald Gall
University of Zurich, Switzerland
,
Nenad Medvidović
University of Southern California, USA

Copyright © 2011 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 21 May 2011

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ICSE11: International Conference on Software Engineering

May 21 - 28, 2011

HI, Waikiki, Honolulu, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 276 of 1,856 submissions, 15%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3426299
Gordillo ACalero CMoraga MGarcía FFernandes JAbreu RSaraiva J(2024)Programming languages ranking based on energy measurementsSoftware Quality Journal10.1007/s11219-024-09690-432:4(1539-1580)Online publication date: 27-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-024-09690-4
Koana ULe QRahman SCarlson CChew FNayebi M(2024)Examining ownership models in software teamsEmpirical Software Engineering10.1007/s10664-024-10538-529:6Online publication date: 27-Sep-2024
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-024-10538-5
Miloudi CCheikhi LIdri AAbran A(2024)On the value of instance selection for bug resolution prediction performanceJournal of Software: Evolution and Process10.1002/smr.2710Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2710
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