AUSearch: Accurate API usage search in Github repositories with type resolution

• Main Authors: ASYROFI, Muhammad Hilmi, THUNG, Ferdian, LO, David, JIANG, Lingxiao
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2020
• Subjects: API usage; code search; GitHub; type resolution; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/5503; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/6506/viewcontent/saner20AUSearch.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Nowadays, developers use APIs to implement their applications. To know how to use an API, developers may search for code examples that use the API in repositories such as GitHub. Although code search engines have been developed to help developers perform such search, these engines typically only accept a query containing the description of the task that needs to be implemented or the names of the APIs that the developer wants to use without the capability for the developer to specify particular search constraints, such as the class and parameter types that the relevant API should take. These engines are not designed for cases when the specific API and its types to search are known and the developers want code examples that show how the specific API is used, and therefore, their search results are often too inaccurate. In this work, we propose a tool, named AUSearch, to fill this gap. Given an API query that allows type constraints, AUSearch finds code examples in GitHub that contain usages of the specific APIs in the query. AUSearch performs type resolutions to ensure that the API usages found in the returned files are indeed invocations of the APIs specified in the query and highlights the relevant lines of code in the files for easier reference. We show that AUSearch is much more accurate than GitHub Code Search. A video demonstrating our tool is available from https://youtu.be/DKiGal5bSkU.