research-article

The evolution of C programming practices: a study of the Unix operating system 1973--2015

Authors:

Diomidis Spinellis,

Panos Louridas,

Maria KechagiaAuthors Info & Claims

ICSE '16: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering

Pages 748 - 759

https://doi.org/10.1145/2884781.2884799

Published: 14 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Tracking long-term progress in engineering and applied science allows us to take stock of things we have achieved, appreciate the factors that led to them, and set realistic goals for where we want to go. We formulate seven hypotheses associated with the long term evolution of C programming in the Unix operating system, and examine them by extracting, aggregating, and synthesising metrics from 66 snapshots obtained from a synthetic software configuration management repository covering a period of four decades. We found that over the years developers of the Unix operating system appear to have evolved their coding style in tandem with advancements in hardware technology, promoted modularity to tame rising complexity, adopted valuable new language features, allowed compilers to allocate registers on their behalf, and reached broad agreement regarding code formatting. The progress we have observed appears to be slowing or even reversing prompting the need for new sources of innovation to be discovered and followed.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ICSE '16: Proceedings of the 38th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 2016

1235 pages

ISBN:9781450339001

DOI:10.1145/2884781

General Chair:
Laura Dillon
Michigan State University
,
Program Chairs:
Willem Visser
Stellenbosch University, South Africa
,
Laurie Williams
North Carolina State University

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

© 2016 Association for Computing Machinery. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of a national government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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SIGSOFT: ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering
IEEE-CS\TCSE: TC on Software Engineering
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Published: 14 May 2016

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ICSE '16: 38th International Conference on Software Engineering

May 14 - 22, 2016

Texas, Austin

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3646548.3672588
Spinellis DAvgeriou P(2021)Evolution of the Unix System Architecture: An Exploratory Case StudyIEEE Transactions on Software Engineering10.1109/TSE.2019.289214947:6(1134-1163)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2021
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