PanicKiller

This website provides supplementary materials for the paper "Towards Fixing Panic Bugs for Real-world Rust Programs".

Abstract

The Rust programming language has garnered significant attention due to its robust safety features and memory management capabilities. Despite its guaranteed memory safety, Rust programs still suffer from runtime errors that are unmanageable, i.e., panic errors. Notably, over half of the bugs in rustc, Rust’s own compiler, are attributable to crash errors stemming from panic errors. However, understanding the root causes and resolving these panics often requires substantial effort due to the limited information provided, and the stack backtrace could be intricate, often omitting the actual fault locations. Although numerous automated program repair techniques exist, we have observed that the prevailing fix patterns do not readily apply to Rust programs due to natural differences in language mechanisms.

To tackle the above challenges, this paper introduces a systematic study aimed at fixing Rust panic bugs. We commence by assembling a dataset, namely Panic4R, which includes 102 real panic bugs and their corresponding fixes from the top 500 downloaded open-source crates. By analyzing Rust's implementation, we identify Rust-specific patterns for fixing panic bugs, which can aid in understanding and providing guidance for generating patches. Finally, we design and implement the first automated fixing tool , PanicKiller, for Rust panic bugs, which effectively generates correct patches on the real-world large-scale dataset, and has already assisted in the resolution of 28 panic bugs in open-source crates. Each resolved issue has been validated by the developers and merged into the respective codebases.

• The dataset Panic4R can be accessed via this link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Panic4R-82F5/README.md

• The source code of PanicKiller can be accessed via this link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PanicKiller-218C/README.md

• The result of our experiment can be accessed via this link: Experiment Results 

Here, we provide more details on Fix Pattern Mining, including more fix patterns PanicKiller uses. 

Note: Patterns with * may contain multiple sub-patterns. Those patterns can be found in the code change, where we use / to indicate alternative changes. 

Error Handling

Borrow/Ownership

Concurrency

Binary Operation

Index and Range Expression

If/If-let Expression

Unsafe

Method Call

Closure

Literal

Return