Efficient method extraction for automatic elimination of type-3 clones

A semantics-preserving transformation by Komondoor and Horwitz has been shown to be most effective in the elimination of type-3 clones. The two original algorithms for realizing this transformation, however, are not as efficient as the related (slice-based) transformations. We present an asymptotically-faster algorithm that implements the same transformation via bidirectional reachability on a program dependence graph, and we prove its equivalence to the original formulation.