A survey of automatic generation of code comments

Abstract

Code comments are a valuable form of documentation attached to code that is the most intuitive and efficient way for programmers to understand software code. Good code comments can help programmers quickly understand the role of source code and facilitate understanding of programs and software maintenance tasks. However, in practice, most programmers only pay attention to the code and ignore the comments and documents, which makes the program's readability and maintainability greatly reduced. Based on the meaning of code comments, this paper discusses the current progress in the field of code comments research, adopts the comparative analysis method, focuses on the classification research of the methods and tools for automatic generation of code comments, expounds its advantages and disadvantages, and reveals the issues that need further study.