SCDetector: Software Functional Clone Detection Based on Semantic Tokens Analysis

Abstract

Code clone detection is to find out code fragments with similar functionalities, which has been more and more important in software engineering. Many approaches have been proposed to detect code clones, in which token-based methods are the most scalable but cannot handle semantic clones because of the lack of consideration of program semantics. To address the issue, researchers conduct program analysis to distill the program semantics into a graph representation and detect clones by matching the graphs. However, such approaches suffer from low scalability since graph matching is typically time-consuming.