Boosting Compiler Testing by Injecting Real-World Code

The research article "Boosting Compiler Testing by Injecting Real-World Code" introduces a new method to enhance compiler testing by using code from real-world applications. By combining code snippets from various projects, the approach aims to create well-formed programs that exercise diverse language features. This method involves extracting real-world code at the function level, integrating function calls into seed programs, and utilizing dynamic execution data to maintain semantics and establish complex data dependencies. The approach, implemented in the Creal tool for testing C compilers, successfully identified and reported 132 bugs in GCC and LLVM over a nine-month period. Most of these bugs were confirmed as unknown and critical, with 101 of them already fixed. The study highlights the effectiveness of using real-world code to stress-test compilers, offering a valuable contribution to compiler testing practices and potentially benefiting other compiler testing efforts.