Recent software advances have led to an expansion of the development and usage of application programming interfaces (APIs). From millions of Android packages (APKs) available on Google Store to millions of open-source packages available in Maven, PyPI, and npm, APIs have become an integral part of software development. Like any software artifact, software APIs evolve and suffer from this evolution. Prior research has uncovered many challenges to the development, usage, and evolution of APIs. While some challenges have been studied and solved, many remain. These challenges are scattered in the literature, which hides advances and cloaks the remaining challenges. In this systematic literature review on APIs and API evolution, we uncover and describe publication trends and trending topics. We compile common research goals, evaluation methods, metrics, and subjects. We summarize the current state-of-the-art and outline known existing challenges as well as new challenges uncovered during this review. We conclude that the main remaining challenges related to APIs and API evolution are (1) automatically identifying and leveraging factors that drive API changes, (2) creating and using uniform benchmarks for research evaluation, and (3) understanding the impact of API evolution on API developers and users with respect to various programming languages.

中文翻译：

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API演进文献的系统回顾

最近的软件进步导致了应用程序编程接口 (API) 的开发和使用的扩展。从 Google Store 上提供的数百万个 Android 包 (APK) 到 Maven、PyPI 和 npm 中提供的数百万个开源包，API 已成为软件开发不可或缺的一部分。与任何软件工件一样，软件 API 也在不断发展，并受到这种发展的影响。先前的研究揭示了 API 的开发、使用和演变面临的许多挑战。尽管已经研究并解决了一些挑战，但仍有许多挑战存在。这些挑战分散在文献中，隐藏了进步并掩盖了剩余的挑战。在这篇关于 API 和 API 演变的系统文献综述中，我们揭示并描述了出版趋势和热门话题。我们汇编共同的研究目标、评估方法、指标和主题。我们总结了当前最先进的技术并概述了已知的现有挑战以及本次审查中发现的新挑战。我们得出结论，与 API 和 API 演变相关的主要剩余挑战是（1）自动识别和利用推动 API 变化的因素，（2）创建和使用统一的基准进行研究评估，以及（3）了解 API 演变对各种编程语言的 API 开发人员和用户。