JFIX: Semantics-based repair of Java programs via symbolic PathFinder

Recently there has been a proliferation of automated program repair (APR) techniques, targeting various programming languages. Such techniques can be generally classified into two families: syntactic- and semantics-based. Semantics-based APR, on which we focus, typically uses symbolic execution to i...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: LE, Xuan Bach D., CHU, Duc-Hiep, LO, David, LE, GOUES, VISSER, Willem
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2017
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Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3690
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4692/viewcontent/jfix_issta17.pdf
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Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
Description
Summary:Recently there has been a proliferation of automated program repair (APR) techniques, targeting various programming languages. Such techniques can be generally classified into two families: syntactic- and semantics-based. Semantics-based APR, on which we focus, typically uses symbolic execution to infer semantic constraints and then program synthesis to construct repairs conforming to them. While syntactic-based APR techniques have been shown success- ful on bugs in real-world programs written in both C and Java, semantics-based APR techniques mostly target C programs. This leaves empirical comparisons of the APR families not fully explored, and developers without a Java-based semantics APR technique. We present JFix, a semantics-based APR framework that targets Java, and an associated Eclipse plugin. JFix is implemented atop Symbolic PathFinder, a well-known symbolic execution engine for Java programs. It extends one particular APR technique (Angelix), and is designed to be sufficiently generic to support a variety of such techniques. We demonstrate that semantics-based APR can indeed efficiently and effectively repair a variety of classes of bugs in large real-world Java programs. This supports our claim that the framework can both support developers seeking semantics-based repair of bugs in Java programs, as well as enable larger scale empirical studies comparing syntactic- and semantics-based APR targeting Java. The demonstration of our tool is available via the project website at: https://xuanbachle.github.io/semanticsrepair/