An Open Framework for Semantic Code Queries on Heterogeneous Repositories

To help developers understand and reuse programs, semantic queries on the source code itself is attractive. Although programs in heterogeneous languages are being controlled for collaborative software development, most queries supported by various source code repositories are based either on the metadata of the repositories, or on indexed identifiers and method signatures. Few provide full support to search for semantic structures that are common across different programming languages. To facilitate the understanding and reuses, in this paper, we propose a novel source code query framework that (1) supports the semantic code queries across different programming languages with a new query language, (2) transforms source code to a unified abstract syntax format and handles heterogeneity at the abstract level, (3) stores source code on a cloud-based NoSQL storage in MangoDB. The efficiency of the framework has been evaluated and confirmed by experiments.