Experimental Implementation of Translation Validation for GCC

2023/07/19

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The article showcases an experimental implementation of translation validation for GCC, similar to LLVM Alive2. The implementation has been successful in uncovering several bugs in GCC, contributing to its improvement. The author mentions that a new production-quality version in C++ is currently being implemented and is expected to be released in the first half of 2023.

To use the experimental implementation, developers need to install the special version of the gcc-python-plugin available in the pysmtgcc branch of the author's fork. Additionally, the Z3 SMT solver and its Python bindings are required.

The article provides code snippets and instructions on how to use the plugin1.py and plugin2.py scripts to compare the Intermediate Representation (IR) before and after each GIMPLE pass, highlighting any miscompilations.

This experimental implementation is a valuable resource for developers interested in translation validation for GCC and can aid in identifying and fixing bugs in the compiler.