renatahodovan / perses

Language-agnostic program reducer.

Perses: Syntax-Directed Program Reduction

Perses is a language-agnostic program reducer to minimize a program with respect to a set of constraints. It takes as input a program to reduce, and a test script which specifies the constraints. It outputs a minimized program which still satisfies the constraints specified in the test script. Compared to Delta Debugging and Hierarchical Delta Debugging, Perses leverages the syntax information in the Antlr grammar, and prunes the search space by avoiding generating syntactically invalid programs.

Build & Use

git clone https://github.com/chengniansun/perses.git
cd perses
bazel build //src/org/perses:perses_deploy.jar

Bazel will generate a self-contained java file named perses_deploy.jar. This jar file includes all required class files, and can be directly run with the following command.

java -jar perses_deploy.jar  [options]? --test-script <test-script.sh> --input-file <program file>

• test-script.sh: The script encodes the constraints that the original program file and the reduced version should satisfy. It should return 0 if the constraints are satisfied.

• program file: the program needs to be reduced. Currently, antlr-hdd supports the following languages, C, Java. Note that we can easily support any other languages, if the specific language can be parsed by an Antlr parser.

Check all available command line arguments

java -jar perses_deploy.jar  --help

For Developers

Perses is written in combination of Java 8 and Kotlin, and built with Bazel.

To build, run

bazel build antlropt/... src/... test/...

To test, run

bazel test test/...

Note that, if you just want to run all the tests, you do not need to run the build command first. Bazel will run it before the test command automatically for you.

Run the tests in the benchmark folder

The tests in the benchmark require an extensive list of prerequisites. We have provided a docker image to set up the testing environment. To start the docker container, run

cd benchmark
./start_docker.sh

In the docker container, you can build the benchmark and run the tests with the following

cd perses
bazel test benchmark/...

For Intellij Users

You can use the Bazel plugin for Intellij to import the project into Ideas, and then run/debug as usual. You can find more at the official documentation

License

GNU General Public License 3.

Reference

Perse was first published at International Conference on Software Engineering 2018 as a full research paper.

@inproceedings{perses,
  author = {Sun, Chengnian and Li, Yuanbo and Zhang, Qirun and Gu, Tianxiao and Su, Zhendong},
  title = {Perses: Syntax-Guided Program Reduction},
  year = {2018},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  doi = {10.1145/3180155.3180236},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering},
  pages = {361–371},
}