I'm search for a tool that could compare source codes for similarity.
We have a very trivial system right now that has huge amount of false positives and the real positives can easily get buried in them.
My requirements are:
- reasonably small amount of false positives
- good detection rate (yeah these are going against each other)
- ideally with a more complex output than just a single value
- usable for C (C99) and C++ (C++03 and optimally C++11)
- still maintained
- usable for comparing two source files against each other
- usable in non-interactive mode
EDIT:
To avoid confusion, the following two code snippets are identical and should be detected as such:
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) { bla; }
int i; while (i < 10) { bla; i++; }
The same here:
int x = 10; y = x + 5;
int a = 10; y = a + 5;
I've used MOSS in the past: http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ to detect plagiarized code. Since it works on a semantic level, it will detect the situations you presented above. The tool is language-aware, so comments are not considered in the analysis, and it goes a long way in detecting code that has been modified through simple search-and-replace of variable and/or function names.
Note: I used the tool a few years ago when I taught computer science in grad school, and it worked wonderfully in detecting code that had been yanked from the internet. Here is a well-documented account of similar application: http://fie2012.org/sites/fie2012.org/history/fie99/papers/1110.pdf
If you google "measure software similarity", you should find a few more useful hits:
http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/assessment/plagiarism/detectiontools_sourcecode.html
Your problem in Computer Science Terminology maybe stated as Source Code Plagiarism Detection. A good start would be to read this article on Dr Dobbs: Detecting Source-Code Plagiarism. It lists the Algorithms for detecting Plagiarism in the source code.
Note: What you have asked for is indeed a tough computing problem :)
May be Copy-paste-detector from PMD?
You could try duplo. It will find common lines. It has some ability to ignore whitespace changes, but doesn't detect code with renamed variables, so it is more a cleanup-aid than a help when detecting plagiarism.
I start to use JPLAG (https://github.com/jplag/jplag) to check code similarity and compare students works in Java and text files.
It works well to check same code structure and variable Substitution.