Publication Type

Conference Proceeding Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

10-2022

Abstract

Program generators play a critical role in generating bug-revealing test programs for compiler testing. However, existing program generators have been tamed nowadays (i.e., compilers have been hardened against test programs generated by them), thus calling for new solutions to improve their capability in generating bug-revealing test programs. In this study, we propose a framework named Remgen, aiming to Remanufacture a random program Generator for this purpose. RemgEnaddresses the challenges of the synthesis of diverse code snippets at a low cost and the selection of the bug-revealing code snippets for constructing new test programs. More specifically, RemgEnfirst designs a grammar-aided synthesis mechanism to synthesize diverse code snippets. Then, a grammar coverage-guided strategy is used to select the most diverse code snippets that may be bug-revealing. As a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Remgen framework, we have remanufactured an old C program generator CCG and named it REMCCG. Our evaluation results show that REMCCG can generate significantly more bug-revealing test programs than the original CCG; notably, Remccg has found 56 new bugs for two mature compilers (i.e., GCC and LLVM), of which 37 have already been fixed by their developers.

Keywords

Reliability, Software testing, Compiler testing, Automated testing, Random program generator, Compiler defect

Discipline

Computer Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Charlotte, USA, 2022 October 31 - November 3

First Page

529

Last Page

540

ISBN

9781665451321

Identifier

10.1109/ISSRE55969.2022.00057

Publisher

IEEE

City or Country

Charlotte, North Carolina, USA

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/ISSRE55969.2022.00057

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