Intertwining Communities: Exploring Libraries that Cross Software Ecosystems

Using libraries in applications has helped developers reduce the costs of reinventing already existing code. However, an increase in diverse technology stacks and third-party library usage has led developers to inevitably switch technologies and search for similar libraries implemented in the new technology. To assist with searching for these replacement libraries, maintainers have started to release their libraries to multiple ecosystems. Our goal is to explore the extent to which these libraries are intertwined between ecosystems. We perform a large-scale empirical study of 1.1 million libraries from five different software ecosystems, i.e., PyPI, CRAN, Maven, RubyGems, and NPM, to identify 4,146 GitHub repositories. As a starting point, insights from the study raise implications for library maintainers, users, contributors, and researchers into understanding how these different ecosystems are becoming more intertwined with each other.