Vaibhav Saini

Di Yang, Pedro Martins, Vaibhav Saini et al.

When programmers look for how to achieve certain programming tasks, Stack Overflow is a popular destination in search engine results. Over the years, Stack Overflow has accumulated an impressive knowledge base of snippets of code that are amply documented. We are interested in studying how programmers use these snippets of code in their projects. Can we find Stack Overflow snippets in real projects? When snippets are used, is this copy literal or does it suffer adaptations? And are these adaptations specializations required by the idiosyncrasies of the target artifact, or are they motivated by specific requirements of the programmer? The large-scale study presented on this paper analyzes 909k non-fork Python projects hosted on Github, which contain 290M function definitions, and 1.9M Python snippets captured in Stack Overflow. Results are presented as quantitative analysis of block-level code cloning intra and inter Stack Overflow and GitHub, and as an analysis of programming behaviors through the qualitative analysis of our findings.

Vaibhav Saini, Hitesh Sajnani, Jaewoo Kim et al.

Given the availability of large source-code repositories, there has been a large number of applications for large-scale clone detection. Unfortunately, despite a decade of active research, there is a marked lack in clone detectors that scale to big software systems or large repositories, specifically for detecting near-miss (Type 3) clones where significant editing activities may take place in the cloned code. This paper demonstrates: (i) SourcererCC, a token-based clone detector that targets the first three clone types, and exploits an index to achieve scalability to large inter-project repositories using a standard workstation. It uses an optimized inverted-index to quickly query the potential clones of a given code block. Filtering heuristics based on token ordering are used to significantly reduce the size of the index, the number of code-block comparisons needed to detect the clones, as well as the number of required token-comparisons needed to judge a potential clone, and (ii) SourcererCC-I, an Eclipse plug-in, that uses SourcererCC's core engine to identify and navigate clones (both inter and intra project) in real-time during software development. In our experiments, comparing SourcererCC with the state-of-the-art tools, we found that it is the only clone detection tool to successfully scale to 250 MLOC on a standard workstation with 12 GB RAM and efficiently detect the first three types of clones (precision 86% and recall 86-100%). Link to the demo: https://youtu.be/l7F_9Qp-ks4

Hitesh Sajnani, Vaibhav Saini, Jeffrey Svajlenko et al.

Despite a decade of active research, there is a marked lack in clone detectors that scale to very large repositories of source code, in particular for detecting near-miss clones where significant editing activities may take place in the cloned code. We present SourcererCC, a token-based clone detector that targets three clone types, and exploits an index to achieve scalability to large inter-project repositories using a standard workstation. SourcererCC uses an optimized inverted-index to quickly query the potential clones of a given code block. Filtering heuristics based on token ordering are used to significantly reduce the size of the index, the number of code-block comparisons needed to detect the clones, as well as the number of required token-comparisons needed to judge a potential clone. We evaluate the scalability, execution time, recall and precision of SourcererCC, and compare it to four publicly available and state-of-the-art tools. To measure recall, we use two recent benchmarks, (1) a large benchmark of real clones, BigCloneBench, and (2) a Mutation/Injection-based framework of thousands of fine-grained artificial clones. We find SourcererCC has both high recall and precision, and is able to scale to a large inter-project repository (250MLOC) using a standard workstation.