Source Code Clone Search

Identifying similarities in source code is the main challenge for reuse, plagiarism, and code clone detection. Code clone search has emerged as a new research branch in clone detection, aiming to provide similarity search functionality for code snippets. While clone search shares its fundamentals with clone detection, both its objective and requirements differ significantly. Clone search focuses on search engines that are designed to find clones of a single input code snippet (i.e., query) from a large set of code snippets (i.e., corpus). Scalability, short response time, and the ability to rank result sets among the major challenges have to be dealt with by a clone search engine. In this chapter, we identify and define major concepts related to clone search. We then present a framework that summarizes the architecture of a clone search engine and enables us to provide a systematic view of the internals of such an engine. Finally, we discuss how to benchmark and evaluate the performance of clone search engines. The discussion includes a set of measures that are helpful in evaluating clone search engines.