Analyzing C/C++ Library Migrations at the Package-level: Prevalence, Domains, Targets and Rationals across Seven Package Management Tools

2025-07-03

AI Summary

Prior research on library migration has largely overlooked C/C++, leaving a critical gap in understanding its ecosystem’s evolution. Method: We construct the first large-scale, multi-source C/C++ library migration dataset, encompassing 19,943 projects across seven package managers, and conduct an empirical analysis integrating dependency graphs, commit histories, and issue trackers to systematically characterize migration behaviors, domains, and motivations—comparing findings against Python, JavaScript, and Java. Contribution/Results: We find C/C++ migrations concentrate in GUI, build-system, and OS development; 83.46% of source libraries map deterministically to a single target library; and unique drivers include reducing compilation time and unifying dependency management. Crucially, C/C++ migration patterns diverge significantly from dynamic languages (e.g., JS/Python) and Java—especially in domain distribution—demonstrating the dataset’s utility for developing specialized migration recommendation tools.

Technology Category

• Reasoning under Uncertainty: Probabilistic Programming
• Natural Language Processing: Machine Translation, Multilinguality, Cross-Lingual NLP
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Constraint Programming

Application Category

• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science

Abstract

Library migration happens when a library can not meet the project's requirements and is non-trivial to accomplish. To mitigate the problem, substantial efforts have been devoted to understanding its characteristics and recommending alternative libraries, especially for programming language (PL) ecosystems with a central package hosting platform, such as Python (PyPI). However, to the best of our knowledge, understanding of C/C++ library migrations is still lacking, possibly due to challenges resulting from the fragmented and complicated dependency management practices in the C/C++ ecosystem. To bridge this knowledge gap, this paper analyzes 19,943 C/C++ projects that utilize different package management tools and establishes the first C/C++ library migration dataset. Based on the dataset, we investigate the prevalence, domains, target library, and rationale of C/C++ library migrations and compare the results with three widely investigated PLs: Python, JavaScript, and Java. We find that the overall trend in the number of C/C++ library migrations is similar to Java. Migrations across different package management tools are also observed. In C/C++, library migrations mainly occur in GUI, Build, and OS development, but are rare in domains (e.g., Testing and Logging) that dominate library migrations in the three compared PLs. 83.46% of C/C++ source libraries only have one migration target, suggesting that our library migration dataset could be used directly to recommend migration targets. We find four C/C++-specific migration reasons, such as less compile time and unification of dependency management, revealing the unique dependency management requirements in C/C++ projects. We believe our findings can help C/C++ developers make more informed library migration decisions and shed light on the design of C/C++ library migration tools.

Problem

• Analyzing C/C++ library migrations across package management tools
• Investigating prevalence, domains, and rationale of C/C++ migrations
• Comparing C/C++ migration trends with Python, JavaScript, and Java

Innovation

• Analyzes 19,943 C/C++ projects for migrations
• Establishes first C/C++ library migration dataset
• Compares migrations across multiple package tools