What is it about?
This work explores how AI can help create better ways to test the software tools that build our programs—called compilers. Instead of having experts design testing tools by hand, we built a system that guides AI to invent and build them automatically. These AI-created tools were surprisingly effective, helping us discover over 130 bugs in widely used compilers like GCC and Clang.
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Why is it important?
Compilers are essential tools in software development, but they are complex and prone to subtle bugs. Our method shows how AI can assist experts in building effective testing tools faster and cheaper. Unlike past approaches that use AI to create test programs directly, our approach is more efficient—it builds tools that generate many useful test programs. This can significantly improve the reliability of compilers and inspire new ways of combining AI and software engineering.
Perspectives
I find it exciting that we were able to combine human knowledge about compilers with AI's creativity and automation. What once required weeks of expert effort can now be done in minutes with the right prompts and guidance. This project showed me how AI can truly work as a partner in advanced system-level software engineering tasks, not just as a tool.
Xianfei Ou
Nanjing University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Mutators Reloaded: Fuzzing Compilers with Large Language Model Generated Mutation Operators, April 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3622781.3674171.
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