Potential Solutions to Challenges in C Program Repair: A Practical Perspective

Automated program repair is to reduce the manual work for bug fixing by human developers. In recent 15 years, the research community of program repair has created many novel techniques. However, these techniques share several assumptions that cannot always be satisfied in daily software development. This badly hurts the application of program repair in practice. For example, many repair techniques assume that test cases are well written before patch generation; many techniques assume that specific language features can be ignored (or already-processed). In this paper, we propose a framework of C program repair, which mainly addresses two challenges: test-independent repair and preprocessor directive processing. Our solution to test-independent repair is to automatically construct patch conditions for C programs via parsing the syntax structures; our solution to preprocessor directive processing is to generate code symbols to replace preprocessor directives. We plan to implement these potential solutions with program analysis techniques. The goal of this paper is to present practical solutions for developers to automate C program repair.