Intelligent token-based code clone detection system for large scale source code

Abstract

Fragments of source-code that are similar are known as code-clones and can cause many difficulties within software applications. As developers develop large-scale applications, code-clones can become more and more pervasive throughout the code-base. There are many proposed methods for detecting such clones in applications and in this paper, we present a novel method for code-clone detection in large-scale repositories. Our token-based code-clone detector, called Intelligent Clone Detection Tool (ICDT) can detect both exact and near-miss clones from large repositories.We present our method for detecting clones and then report the evaluation of ICDT using a large-scale code-clone benchmark, BigCloneEval. Lastly, we compare ICDT to other publicly available and state-ofthe- A rt tools. We find that ICDT is more than capable of finding code-clones in large-scale repositories to a high degree of accuracy.