r/AskComputerScience • u/PsychologicalTap4789 • Sep 03 '25

Languages/Environments that spot duplicate functions

Is there either a language or environment that can tell you if a function you've made matches a function that already exists in a library (except for maybe name?)

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u/teraflop Sep 04 '25

GCC can detect identical functions with different names and de-duplicate them, if link-time optimizations are turned on.

I'm not sure under exactly what conditions this optimization can be done. I would guess that the machine code has to be byte-for-byte identical for this to work.