Scalable detection of semantic clones

Several techniques have been developed for identifying similar code fragments in programs. These similar fragments, referred to as code clones, can be used to identify redundant code, locate bugs, or gain insight into program design. Existing scalable approaches to clone detection are limited to finding program fragments that are similar only in their contiguous syntax. Other, semantics-based approaches are more resilient to differences in syntax, such as reordered statements, related statements interleaved with other unrelated statements, or the use of semantically equivalent control structures. However, none of these techniques have scaled to real world code bases. These approaches capture semantic information from Program Dependence Graphs (PDGs), program representations that encode data and control dependencies between statements and predicates. Our definition of a code clone is also based on this representation: we consider program fragments with isomorphic PDGs to be clones. In ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Mark Gabel, Lingxiao Jiang, Zhendong Su
• Keywords: ICSE 2008, NSF CCF Grant, Similar Code Fragments, Software Engineering, Tree Similarity Problem