학술논문
On the Usage of Programming Languages in the iOS Ecosystem
Document Type
Conference
Source
2022 IEEE 22nd International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM) SCAM Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), 2022 IEEE 22nd International Working Conference on. :176-180 Oct, 2022
Subject
Language
ISSN
2470-6892
Abstract
This paper studies how developers use different programming languages in the iOS ecosystem by examining 161,883 releases of 25,231 third-party libraries spanning 11 years available through CocoaPods, a popular iOS dependency manager. Our empirical study shows that since its release, Swift has been widely adopted, but most libraries, even recent ones, still use Objective-C as their primary programming language. Looking at a small set of 38 open-source iOS apps, instead, we observe that apps are instead predominantly written in Swift by now. We also observe significant C usage across both libraries and apps. Our results suggest that analysis tools for iOS apps should not only support Swift, but also Objective-C and C code.