Mining revision histories to detect cross-language clones without intermediates

• Main Authors: JIANG, Lingxiao, PENG, Zhiming, ZHONG, Hao, YU, Haibo, ZHAO, Jianjun
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Software revision history; Cross-language clone; Diff; Java; C# languages; Programming Languages and Compilers; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3438; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4439/viewcontent/ase16clcminer.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

To attract more users on different platforms, many projects release their versions in multiple programming languages (e.g., Java and C#). They typically have many code snippets that implement similar functionalities, i.e., cross-language clones. Programmers often need to track and modify cross-language clones consistently to maintain similar functionalities across different language implementations. In literature, researchers have proposed approaches to detect cross-language clones, mostly for languages that share a common intermediate language (such as the .NET language family) so that techniques for detecting single-language clones can be applied. As a result, those approaches cannot detect cross-language clones for many projects that are not implemented in a .NET language. To overcome the limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel approach, CLCMiner, that detects cross-language clones automatically without the need of an intermediate language. Our approach mines such clones from revision histories, which reflect how programmers maintain cross-language clones in practice. We have implemented a prototype tool for our approach and conducted an evaluation on five open source projects that have versions in Java and C#. The results show that CLCMiner achieves high accuracy and point to promising future work.