Enriching Compiler Testing with Real Program from Bug Report

Abstract

Researchers have proposed various approaches to generate test programs. The state-of-the-art approaches can be roughly divided into random-based and mutation-based approaches: random-based approaches generate random programs and mutation-based approaches mutate programs to generate more test programs. Both lines of approaches mainly generate random code, but it is more beneficial to use real programs, since it is easier to learn the impacts of compiler bugs and it becomes reasonable to use both valid and invalid code. However, most real programs from code repositories are ineffective to trigger compiler bugs, partially because they are compiled before they are submitted.

Topics & Concepts