NDLI: Random testing of C calling conventions

Content Provider	ACM Digital Library
Author	Lindig, Christian
Abstract	In a C compiler, function calls are difficult to implement correctly because they must respect a platform-specific calling convention. But they are governed by a simple invariant: parameters passed to a function must be received unaltered. A violation of this invariant signals an inconsistency in a compiler. We automatically test the consistency of C compilers using randomly generated programs. An inconsistency manifests itself as an assertion failure when compiling and running the generated code. The generation of programs is type-directed and can be controlled by the user with composable random generators in about 100 lines of Lua. Lua is a scripting language built into our testing tool that drives program generation. Random testing is fully automatic, requires no specification, yet is comparable in effectiveness with specification-based testing from prior work. Using this method, we uncovered 13 new bugs in mature open-source and commercial C compilers.
Starting Page	3
Ending Page	12
Page Count	10
File Format	PDF
ISBN	1595930507
DOI	10.1145/1085130.1085132
Language	English
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Publisher Date	2005-09-19
Publisher Place	New York
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Subject Keyword	Random testing Compiler Composition C Calling convention Consistency
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

Sl.	Authority	Responsibilities	Communication Details
1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
3	National Digital Library of India Office, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	The administrative and infrastructural headquarters of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in
4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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Random testing of C calling conventions