Scala Implicits are Everywhere: A large-scale study of the use of Implicits in the wild
This provides empirical data on a key Scala feature for developers and language designers, but it is incremental as it focuses on usage patterns rather than new methods.
The study analyzed 7,280 Scala projects to understand the widespread use of implicits, finding over 8.1M call sites and 370.7K implicit declarations across 18.7M lines of code.
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.