Eric Eide — Discover ‘deep’ programming language bugs with Xsmith

Eric Eide introduces Xsmith, a Racket library for generating random programs to fuzz test compilers and interpreters.

Xsmith is a Racket library for creating fuzz testers that exercise programming language compilers and interpreters. In other words, Xsmith is a library for creating random program generators. Xsmith aims to help testers generate well-formed, well-behaving programs and thereby search for ‘deep’ bugs in a programming language implementation: i.e., errors that cause correct programs to produce incorrect results. This talk briefly describes Xsmith and a few of the bugs discovered with the help of Xsmith to date.