Students at the University of California Irvine are working on some new technology for understanding and categorizing source code. They’re using it to power two projects, a source code visualization tool and a source code search engine. You can check it out at: sourcerer.ics.uci.edu - They’re just getting started, but click on the submenu items under the “Fingerprints” tab to get an idea of the heuristics they’re looking into (control structures, attributes, and micro-patterns).

In the mean time, us mere mortals will have to be satisfied with the current offerings of source code search engines. Just to name a few:

• www.google.com/codesearch - 46 languages
• www.koders.com - 32 languages
• www.codase.com - C, C++, and Java
• www.krugle.com - 39 languages
• labs.oreilly.com/code - source code examples from nearly 700 O’Reilly books

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