Good news : Kim Mens was granted an Applied PhD 2019 funding from Innoviris, in collaboration with the company Raincode.
This funding will allow Céline Deknop to carry out the doctoral project "CodeDiffNG : Advanced Source Code Diffing", combining theory in UCLouvain and practice with Raincode.
More information about the project "CodeDiffNG : Advanced Source Code Diffing" :
Many techniques exist for comparing code, but most of them are aimed at the situation when the two systems being compared are relatively similar, such as snapshots of two adjacent commits in a same code repository. However, at Raincode Labs, whose core activity is renovation of large codebases of their clients, there is an industrial need to compare systems that are much further apart, sometimes separated by years of development or even consequences of copy-paste programming.
No ready-made solutions exist for such more advanced comparisons. Devising such solutions requires a careful consideration of related work in the fields of syntactic and semantic code and model differencing, grammars, software merging, and code clone management. Taking inspiration from recently proposed differencing, cloning or merge techniques, a set of more innovative code differencing techniques will be explored, prototyped and tried out on large existing case studies provided by and with the help of the industrial partner in this project. For implementing such techniques the use of powerful metaprogramming frameworks will be considered.
More information about Innoviris Applied PhD funding : https://innoviris.brussels/applied-phd