Cross-Language Clone Detection

Abstract

Code duplication is a common software development practice that introduces several similar or identical seg-ments of code, or code clones. In addition, there is currently a trend towards the use of multiple languages in the devel-opment of software systems. While there has been much work on clone detection and increased interest in studies of multi-language software systems, there have been no stud-ies of code clones that span multiple languages, which we term cross-language code clones. In this paper we de-scribe an approach for cross-language clone detection. We then introduce a tool, which is based on the CodeDOM li-brary that is included with the Microsoft.NET Framework, to demonstrate the existence of cross-language clones in a real software system that contains both C # and Visual Ba-sic.NET source code. Because our clone detection algo-rithm operates on a tree structure, other tree-based clone detection algorithms could be substituted in the implemen-tation of our tool. 1.