simplifying testcases with delta debugging

Dan Kegel dank@kegel.com
Thu Aug 4 05:46:00 GMT 2005


Hey kids,
ever run into a program that crashes gcc, and
have trouble trimming the program down to
a minimal test case?  Well, have no fear, Delta Debugging is here!
The little script 'delta', downloadable from
   http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~dsw/
seems to be the magic sauce that lets you
automatically find a minimal test case that still
causes the same ICE.
We just used it to find a minimal test case for
http://gcc.gnu.org/PR23219, and it worked right slick.

See the paper http://www.st.cs.uni-sb.de/papers/tse2002/tse2002.pdf
if you want some examples of how this can be useful.

Imagine a nightly build script that
grabs the latest gcc-4.1 snapshot,
builds your company's products with it
to look for ICEs,
then uses Delta to extract minimal test cases for them,
and reports the minimal test cases to the gcc developers.
That would help make sure that gcc-4.1 is free of ICEs for
your projects by the time it releases.

Now *that* would be cool...


-- 
Trying to get a job as a c++ developer?  See http://kegel.com/academy/getting-hired.html

------
Want more information?  See the CrossGCC FAQ, http://www.objsw.com/CrossGCC/
Want to unsubscribe? Send a note to crossgcc-unsubscribe@sources.redhat.com



More information about the crossgcc mailing list