[Research Paper] Semantics-Based Code Search Using Input/Output Examples
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Jiang, Renhe; Chen, Zhengzhao; Zhang, Zejun; Pei, Yu; Pan, Minxue; Zhang, Tian
- Source
- 2018 IEEE 18th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM) SCAM Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), 2018 IEEE 18th International Working Conference on. :92-102 Sep, 2018
- Subject
- Computing and Processing
Encoding
Java
Semantics
Indexes
Containers
Software
Transforms
code query
symbolic analysis
SMT solver
- Language
- ISSN
- 2470-6892
As the quality and quantity of open source code increase, semantics-based code search has become an emerging need for software developers to retrieve and reuse existing source code. We present an approach of semantics-based code search using input/output examples for the Java language. Our approach encodes Java methods in code repositories into path constraints via symbolic analysis and leverages SMT solvers to find the methods whose path constraints can satisfy the given input/output examples. Our approach extends the applicability of the semantics-based search technology to more general Java code compared with existing methods. To evaluate our approach, we encoded 1228 methods from GitHub and applied semantics-based code search on 35 queries extracted from Stack Overflow. Correct method code for 29 queries was obtained during the search and the average search time was just about 48 seconds.