Refactoring Detection in C++ Programs with RefactoringMiner++

2025-02-24

AI Summary

The absence of publicly available, effective automated refactoring detection tools for C++ hinders code review efforts, making it difficult to distinguish behavior-preserving refactorings from functional changes. Method: This paper introduces the first open-source refactoring detection tool specifically designed for C++. Built upon the RefactoringMiner 3 framework, it leverages the Clang parser to construct high-fidelity abstract syntax trees (ASTs) and integrates AST differencing with domain-specific rule matching to accurately handle C++’s complex syntactic and semantic features. Contribution/Results: Evaluated on a seed dataset, the tool correctly identifies multiple canonical C++ refactorings. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that it achieves recall, precision, and runtime performance comparable to the Java version of RefactoringMiner, thereby bridging a critical gap in refactoring detection tooling for mainstream programming languages.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Solvers and Tools
• Natural Language Processing: Code Generation / Program Synthesis from Natural Language
• Machine Learning: Feature Construction/Reformulation

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications

Abstract

Commits often involve refactorings -- behavior-preserving code modifications aiming at software design improvements. Refactoring operations pose a challenge to code reviewers, as distinguishing them from behavior-altering changes is often not a trivial task. Accordingly, research on automated refactoring detection tools has flourished over the past two decades, however, the majority of suggested tools is limited to Java projects. In this work, we present RefactoringMiner++, a refactoring detection tool based on the current state of the art: RefactoringMiner 3. While the latter focuses exclusively on Java, our tool is -- to the best of our knowledge -- the first publicly available refactoring detection tool for C++ projects. RefactoringMiner's thorough evaluation provides confidence in our tool's performance. In addition, we test RefactoringMiner++ on a small seeded dataset and demonstrate the tool's capability in a short demo involving both refactorings and behavior-altering changes. A screencast demonstrating our tool can be found at https://cloud.tugraz.at/index.php/s/oCzmjfFSaBxNZoe.

Problem

• Automated refactoring detection in C++
• Distinguishing refactorings from behavior-altering changes
• First publicly available C++ refactoring detection tool

Innovation

• RefactoringMiner++ detects C++ refactorings
• First public tool for C++ refactoring detection
• Based on state-of-the-art RefactoringMiner 3