Intelligent code search aids edge software development

Abstract

The growth of multimedia applications poses new challenges to software facilities in edge computing. Developers must effectively develop edge computing software to accommodate the rapid expansion of multimedia applications. Code search has become a prevalent practice to enhance the efficiency of the construction of edge software infrastructure. Researchers have proposed lots of approaches for code search, and employed deep learning technology to extract features from program representations, such as token, AST, graphs, method name, and API. Nevertheless, two prominent issues remain: 1) there are only a few studies on the effective use of graph representation for code search (especially in Java language), and 2) there is a lack of empirical study on the contributions of different program representations. To address these issues, we conduct an empirical study to explore program representations, especially program graphs. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to conduct code search with mixed graphs representation for Java language, containing the control flow graph and the program dependence graph. We also present a hybrid approach to capture and fuse the features of a program with representations of Token, AST, and Mixed Graphs (TAMG). The results of our experiment show that our approach possesses the best ability (R@1 with 37% and R@10 with 67.1%). Our graph representation exhibits a positive effect, and the token and AST also have a significant contribution to the code search. Our findings can aid developers in efficiently searching for the desired code while constructing the software infrastructure for edge computing, which is crucial for the rapid expansion of multimedia applications.