Rapid Multi-Purpose, Multi-Commit Code Analysis

Existing code- and software evolution studies typically operate on the scale of a few revisions of a small number of projects, mostly because existing tools are unsuited for performing large-scale studies. We present a novel approach, which can be used to analyze an arbitrary number of revisions of a software project simultaneously and which can be adapted for the analysis of mixed-language projects. It lays the foundation for building high-performance code analyzers for a variety of scenarios. We show that for one particular scenario, namely code metric computation, our prototype outperforms existing tools by multiple orders of magnitude when analyzing thousands of revisions.