Making automatic repair for large-scale programs more efficient using weak recompilation

For large-scale programs, automatically repairing a bug by modifying source code is often a time-consuming process due to plenty of time spent on recompiling and reinstalling the patched program. To suppress the above time cost and make the repair process more efficient, a recompilation technique called weak recompilation is described in this paper. In weak recompilation, a program is assumed to be constructed from a set of components, and for each candidate patch only the changed code fragment in term of one component is recompiled to a shared library; the behaviors of patched program are observed by executing the original program with an instrumentation tool which can wrap specified function. The advantage of weak recompilation is that redundant recompilation cost can be suppressed, and reinstallation cost will be cut down completely. We also built WAutoRepair, a system which enables scalability to fix bugs in large-scale C programs with high efficiency. The experiments confirm that our repair system significantly outperforms Genprog, a famous approach for automatic program repair. For the wireshark program containing over 2 millions lines of code, WAutoRepair spent only 0.222 seconds in recompiling one candidate patch and 8.035 seconds in totally repairing the bug, compared to Genprog separately taking about 20.484 and 75.493 seconds, on average.