SIGPLAN Programming Languages Design and Implementation
We are delighted to inform you that Department of Computing PhD student Stefanos Chaliasos, his supervisors Dr. Ben Livshits and Dr. Arthur Gervais have received the distinguished paper award and the best artifact award at PLDI 2022, the premier international conference on state-of-the-art research in programming languages.
Their joint work, "Finding Typing Compiler Bugs," was done in collaboration with Thodoris Sotiropoulos and Prof. Diomidis Spinellis of Athens University of Economics and Business, and Dr. Dimitrios Mitropoulos of the University of Athens, presents a testing framework called Hephaestus, for validating static typing procedures in compilers. The core components of Hephaestus are a program generator and two mutators suitably crafted for producing programs that are likely to trigger typing compiler bugs. The extensibility of Hephaestus enables it to test the compilers of three popular JVM languages: Java, Kotlin, and Groovy. Within nine months of testing, Hephaestus has found more than 150 bugs with diverse manifestations and root causes in all the examined compilers. Most of the discovered bugs lie in the heart of many critical components related to static typing, such as type inference. The implementation of Hephaestus can be found in the following link: https://github.com/hephaestus-compiler-project/hephaestus.
Article text (excluding photos or graphics) © Imperial College London.
Photos and graphics subject to third party copyright used with permission or © Imperial College London.
Reporter
Mr Ahmed Idle
Department of Computing
