Programming language researchers often study real-world projects to see how language features have been adopted and are being used. Typically researchers choose a small number of projects to study, due to the immense challenges associated with finding, downloading, storing, processing, and querying large amounts of data. The Boa programming language and infrastructure was designed to solve these challenges and allow researchers to focus on simply asking the right questions. Boa provides a domain-specific language to abstract details of how to mine hundreds of thousands of projects and also abstracts how to efficiently query that data.

We have previously used this platform to perform a large study of the adoption of Java’s language features over time. In this demonstration, we will show you how we used Boa to quickly analyze billions of AST nodes and study the adoption of Java’s language features.