Detecting Compiler Warning Defects Via Diversity-Guided Program Mutation

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Compiler diagnostic warnings help developers identify potential programming mistakes during program compilation. However, these warnings could be erroneous due to the defects of compiler warning diagnostics. Although the existing technique (i.e., Epiphron) can automatically generate test programs for compiler warning defect detection, the effectiveness of Epiphron on defect-finding is still limited, due to the limitation for generating warning-sensitive test program structures. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a DIversity-guided PROgram Mutation approach, called DIPROM, to construct diverse warning-sensitive programs for effective compiler warning defect detection. Given a seed test program, DIPROM first removes its dead code to reduce false positive warning defects. Then, the abstract syntax tree (AST) of the test program is constructed; DIPROM iteratively mutates the structures of the AST to generate warning-sensitive program variants. To effectively construct diverse warning-sensitive structures, DIPROM applies a novel diversity-guided strategy to generate program variants in each iteration. With the generated program variants, differential testing is conducted to detect warning defects in different compilers. In the experiments, we evaluate DIPROM with two popular C compilers (i.e., GCC and Clang). Experimental results show that DIPROM significantly outperforms three state-of-the-art approaches (i.e., HiCOND, Epiphron, and Hermes) by up to 18.93% <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\sim$</tex-math></inline-formula> 76.74% in terms of the bug-finding capability on average. Meanwhile, DIPROM is efficient, which spends less time on finding the same average number of warning defects. We at last applied DIPROM to the latest development versions of GCC and Clang. After two months’ running, we reported 8 new warning defects; 5 of them have been confirmed/fixed by developers.