OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced the development of technology to quickly identify changed locations in source code, such as added functions, to enable timely development using large scale open source software.

Open source software (OSS) can be easily used by anyone around the world, and its source code - what might be called its blueprints - can be repeatedly changed, adding and deleting functions, without detailed records of what was changed. In this situation, software developers working on OSS will often independently add their own changes along the way, as they see fit. Understanding where changes have been made in the OSS source code is a necessary, yet time-consuming process.

Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed a technology that can quickly compare changes in the source code by analyzing functions' call paths from the source code. This technology was able to identify approximately 400 changed locations in a program with 3.8 million lines of code in about 1/4th of the time of existing source code text comparison methods.

Going forward, Fujitsu Laboratories expects that by quickly identifying changes in large-scale OSS, this technology will be useful in speeding up OSS development.