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Cited by 586

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 23 of the 23 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers

Yang, Xuejun, Chen, Yang, Eide, Eric, Regehr, John·2011·ACM SIGPLAN Notices

Abstract

Compilers should be correct. To improve the quality of C compilers, we created Csmith, a randomized test-case generation tool, and spent three years using it to find compiler bugs. During this period we reported more than 325 previously unknown bugs to compiler developers. Every compiler we tested was found to crash and also to silently generate wrong code when presented with valid input. In this paper we present our compiler-testing tool and the results of our bug-hunting study. Our first contribution is to advance the state of the art in compiler testing. Unlike previous tools, Csmith generates programs that cover a large subset of C while avoiding the undefined and unspecified behaviors that would destroy its ability to automatically find wrong-code bugs. Our second contribution is a collection of qualitative and quantitative results about the bugs we have found in open-source C compilers.

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Metadata

Authors
Yang, X., Chen, Y., Eide, E., & Regehr, J.
Venue
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
Published
2011-06-04
Volume
46
Issue
6
Pages
283-294
ISSN
  • 0362-1340 (ISSN-L)
  • 1558-1160
OpenAlex
W2098456636
Cited by
586
References
23
FWCI
102.34
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1145/1993316.1993532
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Yang, X., Chen, Y., Eide, E., & Regehr, J. (2011). Finding and understanding bugs in C compilers. ACM SIGPLAN Notices. https://doi.org/10.1145/1993316.1993532

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