Are Java programmers transitioning to multicore?: a large scale study of java FLOSS

We would like to know if Java developers are retrofitting applications to become concurrent and, to get better performance on multicore machines. Also, we would like to know what concurrent programming constructs they currently use. Evidence of how programmers write concurrent programs can help other programmers to be more efficient when using the available constructs. Moreover, this evidence can assist researchers in devising new mechanisms and improving existing ones. For this purpose, we have conducted a study targeting a large-scale Java open source repository, SourceForge. We have analyzed a number of FLOSS projects along two dimensions: spatial and temporal. For the spatial dimension, we studied the latest versions of more than 2000 projects. Our goal is to understand which constructs developers of concurrent systems employ and how frequently they use them. For the temporal dimension we took a closer look at various versions of six projects and analyzed how the use of concurrency constructs has evolved over time. In addition, we tried to establish if uses of concurrency control constructs were aimed at leveraging multicore processors. We have downloaded more than two thousand Java projects including their various versions, in addition to individual analysing about six well known open-source projects.