Making Sense of Online Code SnippetsSiddharth Subramanian, Reid HolmesUniversity of Waterloo

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Indexes millions of random code snippets from the internet

Public Code on

the Internet

Traditional Code Search

crawler

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

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Curated Code Search

Indexes millions of random code snippets from the internet

Indexes a limited set of good quality code snippets

Public Code on

the Internet

Traditional Code Search

crawler

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

crawler

Code Search Challenges

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Code Search Challenges

chrono -Type unknown!run()- 20 different methods

java.util.TimerTask.run() android.os.HandlerThread.run() …

start()- 26 different methods android.media.MediaPlayer.start() android.animation.Animator.start() …

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

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Code Search ChallengesPROBLEMS WITH LEXICAL SEARCH

Code is treated as plain-text

Underlying API linkage is lost

Method name collisions

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

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Code Search Challenges

chrono -android.widget.Chronometerrun()-java.lang.Runnable.run()

start()- android.widget.Chronometer.start()

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

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Code Search ChallengesPROBLEMS WITH LEXICAL SEARCH PROBLEMS WITH PARSING CODE

Code snippets are often incomplete Missing class declarations Missing method declarations Incomplete code fragments

Code is treated as plain-text

Underlying API linkage is lost

Method name collisions

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

Approach

Approach

[Parnin et. al., Georgia Tech, Tech. Rep., 2012]

Approach

SnipParse

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Code Snippet Parser

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Approach

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

SnipParse

Curated Snippet Repository

• Android Types• Android Methods

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Code Snippet Parser

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Approach

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

SnipParse

Curated Snippet Repository

• Android Types• Android Methods

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CodeHunter

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Code Search Web InterfaceCode Snippet Parser

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Summary Enabling Curated Search

http://awenda.cs.uwaterloo.ca/snippet/

https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~rtholmes/papers/msr_2013_subramanian.pdf

MAKING SENSE OF ONLINE CODE SNIPPETS - SIDDHARTH SUBRAMANIAN, REID HOLMES MSR '13

SnipParse

Curated Snippet Repository

• Android Types• Android Methods

1

CodeHunter

Code Search Web InterfaceCode Snippet Parser