CodeMatcher: a tool for large-scale code search based on query semantics matching
Chao Chin Liu, Xuanlin Bao, Xin Xia, Meng Ling Yan, David Lo, Ting Zhang · Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering · 2022
Due to the emergence of large-scale codebases, such as GitHub and Gitee, searching and reusing existing code can help developers substantially improve software development productivity. Over the years, many code search tools have been developed. Early tools leveraged the information retrieval (IR) technique to perform an efficient code search for a frequently changed large-scale codebase. However, the search accuracy was low due to the semantic mismatch between query and code. In the recent years, many tools leveraged Deep Learning (DL) technique to address this issue. But the DL-based tools are slow and the search accuracy is unstable.