Testing and Verification of Compilers

Summary

This report documents the Dagstuhl Seminar 17502 "Testing and Verification of Compilers".

Compilers underpin all software development, but bugs in them can be particularly hard to notice if they result in "silent failure", where a program appears to work but is subtly miscompiled. Thus a compiled program may behave erroneously even when the source form of it appears entirely correct.

Despite the common wisdom that "it is never the compiler's fault", bugs in compilers are in fact relatively common, and finding them is a challenging and active area of research.

This seminar brought together researchers in that area with a broader group of researchers and practitioners in software testing and verification, and in compiler development itself, to share their experiences and discuss the open questions and challenges that the field presents. The goal was to brainstorm new ideas for how to approach these challenges, and to help foster longer-term collaborations between the participants.

The seminar involved a number of talks from participants about their particular areas of work and research, followed by working groups where various specific challenges were discussed. It then concluded with an open panel session on the challenges and concepts of compiler testing and verification.

This report presents the collection of abstracts associated with the participant presentations, followed by notes summarising each discussion session and the concluding panel, which we provide as a resource for researchers who are interested in understanding the state of the art and open problems in this field.