10.1145/3360589
https://zenodo.org/records/3407292
oai:zenodo.org:3407292
Krikava, Filip
Filip
Krikava
0000-0002-0478-6202
Czech Technical University
Miller, Heather
Heather
Miller
Carnegie Mellon University
Vitek, Jan
Jan
Vitek
Northeastern University, Czech Technical University
Scala Implicits Are Everywhere: A Large-Scale Study of the Use of Scala Implicits in the Wild
Zenodo
2019
Implicit parameters, implicit conversions, corpora analysis, Scala
2019-09-13
arXiv:1908.07883
https://zenodo.org/communities/eu
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
The Scala programming language offers two distinctive language features implicit parameters and implicit
conversions, often referred together as implicits. Announced without fanfare in 2004, implicits have quickly
grown to become a widely and pervasively used feature of the language. They provide a way to reduce the
boilerplate code in Scala programs. They are also used to implement certain language features without having
to modify the compiler. We report on a large-scale study of the use of implicits in the wild. For this, we
analyzed 7,280 Scala projects hosted on GitHub, spanning over 8.1M call sites involving implicits and 370.7K
implicit declarations across 18.7M lines of Scala code.
European Commission
10.13039/501100000780
695412
Evolving Language Ecosystems