Mining revision histories to detect cross-language clones without intermediates

To attract more users on different platforms, many projects release their versions in multiple programming languages (e.g., Java and C#). They typically have many code snippets that implement similar functionalities, i.e., cross-language clones. Programmers often need to track and modify crosslanguage clones consistently to maintain similar functionalities across different language implementations. In literature, researchers have proposed approaches to detect crosslanguage clones, mostly for languages that share a common intermediate language (such as the .NET language family) so that techniques for detecting single-language clones can be applied. As a result, those approaches cannot detect cross-language clones for many projects that are not implemented in a .NET language. To overcome the limitation, in this paper, we propose a novel approach, CLCMiner, that detects cross-language clones automatically without the need of an intermediate language. Our approach mines such clones from revision histories, which reect how programmers maintain cross-language clones in practice. We have implemented a prototype tool for our approach and conducted an evaluation on five open source projects that have versions in Java and C#. The results show that CLCMiner achieves high accuracy and point to promising future work.