Scalable and Accurate Detection of Function Clones in Software Using Multithreading

Abstract

Code cloning is defined as a programming practice in which a programmer reuses a code fragment after modifying existing codes or copying it as it is. Code clones can be detected at various levels or varying granularity size but when they are detected at the function level of a program, they are called function clones. Since in non-object oriented languages, functions are the defining components of any software, so detection of function clones can be very useful and can help in reducing the cost of maintenance. In this paper, we have proposed a multi-threading metrics-based detection algorithm for detecting Type-I and Type-II function clones. We evaluated our approach on three C-language open source projects. The time-consumption for detection is reduced to a greater extent giving a higher performance as compared to CloneManager, one of the recent function clone detector.