TreeCen: Building Tree Graph for Scalable Semantic Code Clone Detection

Abstract

Code clone detection is an important research problem that has attracted wide attention in software engineering. Many methods have been proposed for detecting code clone, among which text-based and token-based approaches are scalable but lack consideration of code semantics, thus resulting in the inability to detect semantic code clones. Methods based on intermediate representations of codes can solve the problem of semantic code clone detection. However, graph-based methods are not practicable due to code compilation, and existing tree-based approaches are limited by the scale of trees for scalable code clone detection.