Developing a Fuzzer for the Toy Optimizer to Detect Compiler Optimization Bugs
By
surprisetalk
Baker's choice. Dense with flavour, light on filler.
Summary
The article discusses creating a fuzzer for the Toy Optimizer compiler project to automatically detect correctness bugs in optimization passes. It explains that while manual test suites can miss corner cases, especially those involving interactions between multiple optimization components, a fuzzer with a proper correctness oracle can help identify subtle bugs where the optimizer introduces errors rather than just causing crashes.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledIt's hard to get compiler optimizers right. Even if you build up a painstaking test suite by hand, you will likely miss corner cases, especially corner cases at the interactions of multiple components or multiple optimization passes.
I wanted to see if I could write a fuzzer to catch some of these bugs automatically.
But a fuzzer alone isn't much use without some correctness oracle—in this case, we want a more interesting bug than accidentally crashing the optimizer.
We want to see if the optimizer introduces a correctness bug in the program.
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