{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/analyzing-2-3-million-maven-dependencies-to","title":"API Beauty is in the eye of the Clients: 2.2 Million Maven Dependencies reveal the Spectrum of Client-API Usages","arxiv_id":"1908.09757","date":"2019-08-26","proceeding":null,"authors":["Nicolas Harrand","Amine Benelallam","César Soto-Valero","François Bettega","Olivier Barais","Benoit Baudry"],"abstract":"Hyrum's law states a common observation in the software industry: \"With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody\". Meanwhile, recent research results seem to contradict this observation when they state that \"for most APIs, there is a small number of features that are actually used\". We investigate this seeming paradox between the observations in industry and the research literature, with a large scale empirical study of client API relationships in one single ecosystem: Maven Central. We study the 94 most popular libraries in Maven Central, as well as the 829,410 client artifacts that declare a dependency to these libraries and that are available in Maven Central, summing up to 2.2M dependencies. Our analysis indicates the existence of a wide spectrum of API usages, with enough clients, most API types end up being used at least once. Our second key observation is that, for all libraries, there is a small set of API types that are used by the vast majority of its clients. The practical consequences of this study are two-fold: (i) it is possible for API maintainers to find an essential part of their API on which they can focus their efforts; (ii) API developers should limit the public API elements to the set of features for which they are ready to have users.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09757v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1908.09757v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"analyzing-2-3-million-maven-dependencies-to","repo_url":"https://github.com/castor-software/core-83","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}