MSCCD: Grammar Pluggable Clone Detection Based on ANTLR Parser Generation

• Main Authors: Zhu, Wenqing, Yoshida, Norihiro, Kamiya, Toshihiro, Choi, Eunjong, Takada, Hiroaki
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 06-04-2022
• Subjects: Computer Science - Software Engineering
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2204.01028

For various reasons, programming languages continue to multiply and evolve.
It has become necessary to have a multilingual clone detection tool that can
easily expand supported programming languages and detect various code clones is
needed. However, research on multilingual code clone detection has not received
sufficient attention. In this study, we propose MSCCD (Multilingual Syntactic
Code Clone Detector), a grammar pluggable code clone detection tool that uses a
parser generator to generate a code block extractor for the target language.
The extractor then extracts the semantic code blocks from a parse tree. MSCCD
can detect Type-3 clones at various granularities. We evaluated MSCCD's
language extensibility by applying MSCCD to 20 modern languages. Sixteen
languages were perfectly supported, and the remaining four were provided with
the same detection capabilities at the expense of execution time. We evaluated
MSCCD's recall by using BigCloneEval and conducted a manual experiment to
evaluate precision. MSCCD achieved equivalent detection performance equivalent
to state-of-the-art tools.