Paper: On the Feasibility of Deduplicating Compiler Bugs with Bisection

Abstract


Random testing has proven to be an effective technique for compiler
validation. However, the debugging of bugs identified through random
testing presents a significant challenge due to the frequent occurrence of
duplicate test programs that expose identical compiler bugs. The process
to identify duplicates is a practical research problem known as bug
deduplication. Prior methodologies for compiler bug deduplication
primarily rely on program analysis to extract bug-related features for
duplicate identification, which can result in substantial computational
overhead and limited generalizability. This paper investigates the
feasibility of employing bisection, a standard debugging procedure largely
overlooked in prior research on compiler bug deduplication, for this
purpose. Our study demonstrates that the utilization of bisection to
locate failure-inducing commits provides a valuable criterion for
deduplication, albeit one that requires supplementary techniques for more
accurate identification. Building on these results, we introduce BugLens,
a novel deduplication method that primarily uses bisection, enhanced by
the identification of bug-triggering optimizations to minimize false
negatives. Empirical evaluations conducted on four real-world datasets
demonstrate that BugLens significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art
analysis-based methodologies Tamer and D3 by saving an average of 26.98%
and 9.64% human effort to identify the same number of distinct bugs. Given
the inherent simplicity and generalizability of bisection, it presents a
highly practical solution for compiler bug deduplication in real-world
applications.


https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23281


Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Taughannock Networks, Trumansburg NY
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.