An Empirical Study on Cross-language Clone Bugs
Authors: 
Honghao Chen, Ye Tang, 
Hao ZhongAuthors Info & Claims
Pages 280 - 281
Abstract
Many applications have implementations in different languages. Although their languages are different, they can implement similar or even identical functionalities. If an implementation has a bug, the other implementations can have corresponding bugs. In this paper, we call them cross-language clone bugs, or mirror bugs for short. Mirror bugs are important since many applications release implementations in different languages. From mirror bugs, it can be feasible to learn more bug patterns, and thus detect more types of bugs. Although researchers have conducted empirical studies to analyze the bugs in clones, to the best of our knowledge, no study has ever explored mirror bugs. As a result, many research questions are still open. For example, are there any mirror bugs in real projects? Are bug fixes in a language useful to detect and repair bugs in other languages? To answer the above questions, in this paper, we conduct the first empirical study on mirror bugs. In this study, we manually analyze 402 bugs that are collected from four projects, and each project releases a Java implementation and C# implementation. Our study presents answers to two interesting research questions. According to our results, there is a timely need for a tool that assists in detecting mirror bugs. Indeed, we find that some programmers already manually identify and fix mirror bugs, even without any tool support.
References
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Xiao Cheng, Zhiming Peng, Lingxiao Jiang, Hao Zhong, Haibo Yu, and Jianjun Zhao. 2016. Mining revision histories to detect cross-language clones without intermediates. In Proc. ASE. 696--701.
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Published In
April 2024
531 pages
ISBN:9798400705021
DOI:10.1145/3639478
- Co-chairs:
- Ana Paiva,
- Rui Abreu,
- Program Co-chairs:
- Abhik Roychoudhury,
- Margaret Storey
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- Faculty of Engineering of University of Porto
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Association for Computing Machinery
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Publication History
Published: 23 May 2024
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- Short-paper
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- National Nature Science Foundation of China
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ICSE-Companion '24
Sponsor:
ICSE-Companion '24: 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
April 14 - 20, 2024
Lisbon, Portugal
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