OSCH: A Clone Hunter for Open Source Community

With the popular of open source community and git-based version control systems, more and more large-scale repositories and software are emerging. Code reuse has become more common. Meanwhile, clone detection techniques have made great progress in accuracy after a long time development and are being optimized for scalability and execution efficiency. However, there few clone detection tools available for the open source community. Therefore, it is meaningful to build a clone detection tool which integrates clone detection methods with the characters of open source project. In this paper, we extend the state-of-the-art clone detection tool (NIL) to create a open source clone hunter(OSCH) by combining the features of the NIL algorithm with open source community. We compare the hunter with directly using NIL based on open source project files and it performed better in terms of execution efficiency, scalability, and accuracy. The code of the hunter has been open-sourced, and it can be used to study the evolution of code clone throughout the history of software development or between open source communities because of its scalability characteristics.