Perses: syntax-guided program reduction

Chengnian Sun, Yuanbo Li, Qirun Zhang, Tianxiao Gu, Zhendong Su

Abstract

Given a program P that exhibits a certain property Ψ (e.g., a C program that crashes GCC when it is being compiled), the goal of program reduction is to minimize P to a smaller variant P′ that still exhibits the same property, i.e., Ψ(P′). Program reduction is important and widely demanded for testing and debugging. For example, all compiler/interpreter development projects need effective program reduction to minimize failure-inducing test programs to ease debugging. However, state-of-the-art program reduction techniques --- notably Delta Debugging (DD), Hierarchical Delta Debugging (HDD), and C-Reduce --- do not perform well in terms of speed (reduction time) and quality (size of reduced programs), or are highly customized for certain languages and thus lack generality.

BibTeX

@inproceedings{Sun-al:ICSE18,
  author    = {Chengnian Sun and
               Yuanbo Li and
               Qirun Zhang and
               Tianxiao Gu and
               Zhendong Su},
  title     = {Perses: syntax-guided program reduction},
  booktitle = {ICSE},
  pages     = {361--371},
  publisher = {{ACM}},
  year      = {2018},
}

Perses: syntax-guided program reduction

Abstract

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