Abstract:

To attract more developers or to support different platforms, open source organizations or business companies tend to re-implement their projects using different programming languages. In these multilanguage projects, it is difficult to avoid crosslanguage code clones. Crosslanguage clone detection becomes an important part of the maintenance. However, most tools can only detect clones in the same language and they cannot detect crosslanguage code clones between languages like Java and C#. In this paper, we propose a new approach based on revision similarity to detect crosslanguage clones on different platforms. The tool is able to find code clones between Java and C#. We evaluate our tool on two open source projects, ANTLR and FpML. Experiments show that our tool can identify crosslanguage code clones efficiently.

Key words: clone detection, information retrieval, data mining, revision similarity