Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Calling conventions are hard – fuzz them (achacompilers.blogspot.com)
31 points by andrewchambers on Sept 20, 2015 | hide | past | favorite | 8 comments


Quest was a much earlier tool (ca. 2005) with similar goals: https://github.com/lindig/quest


I'm the author of Quest - thanks for linking to it. Feel free to ask questions about it. If anyone wants to try it: it's implemented in OCaml and can be installed from OCaml's package manager Opam: "opam install quest".


Quick anecdote: I always demoed Quest by running it in a loop testing GCC on an Apple laptop and it would always find a compiler bug. No longer, it seems. I've tried it on OS X 10.10.5 today and so far couldn't find a bug in GCC or Clang.


I think the interop between compilers may have more bugs since that isn't tested for complicated struct args much. Another good place to try is the tcc arm port.


Really cool, I did a quick search before I wrote my version and didn't see it. Thanks for writing quest, I will add it to my toolbox.


Browsing through the source, Quest also seems to be a really excellent example of Literate Programming.


Thats for the link, another set of tools that are really great - https://embed.cs.utah.edu/csmith/ https://embed.cs.utah.edu/creduce/


Awesome! Nice write-up. And thanks for submitting those bugs back to the maintainers.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: