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Semantic code browsing*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

ISABEL GARCÍA-CONTRERAS ,
JOSÉ F. MORALES  and
MANUEL V. HERMENEGILDO
ISABEL GARCÍA-CONTRERAS
Affiliation:
IMDEA Software Institute (e-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected])
JOSÉ F. MORALES
Affiliation:
IMDEA Software Institute (e-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected])
MANUEL V. HERMENEGILDO
Affiliation:
IMDEA Software Institute (e-mails: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]) School of Computer Science, Technical University of Madrid (UPM) (e-mail: [email protected])
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Abstract

Programmers currently enjoy access to a very high number of code repositories and libraries of ever increasing size. The ensuing potential for reuse is however hampered by the fact that searching within all this code becomes an increasingly difficult task. Most code search engines are based on syntactic techniques such as signature matching or keyword extraction. However, these techniques are inaccurate (because they basically rely on documentation) and at the same time do not offer very expressive code query languages. We propose a novel approach that focuses on querying for semantic characteristics of code obtained automatically from the code itself. Program units are pre-processed using static analysis techniques, based on abstract interpretation, obtaining safe semantic approximations. A novel, assertion-based code query language is used to express desired semantic characteristics of the code as partial specifications. Relevant code is found by comparing such partial specifications with the inferred semantics for program elements. Our approach is fully automatic and does not rely on user annotations or documentation. It is more powerful and flexible than signature matching because it is parametric on the abstract domain and properties, and does not require type definitions. Also, it reasons with relations between properties, such as implication and abstraction, rather than just equality. It is also more resilient to syntactic code differences. We describe the approach and report on a prototype implementation within the Ciao system.

Keywords

Semantic Code SearchAbstract InterpretationAssertions
Type
Regular Papers
Information
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming , Volume 16 , Special Issue 5-6: 32nd International Conference on Logic Programming , September 2016 , pp. 721 - 737
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

This research has received funding from the EU FP7 agreement no 318337, ENTRA, Spanish MINECO TIN2012-39391 StrongSoft and TIN2015-67522-C3-1-R TRACES projects, and the Madrid M141047003 N-GREENS program.

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