Automatic repair of code defects in the svace system

S. V. Syromiatnikov

Ivannikov Institute for System Programming of the RAS

Abstract: The main task described in this article is automatic fixing defects in C/C++ code found by a static analyzer on big software projects. We describe how we solved this task for Svace static analyzer and discuss main principles of automatic fixing defects of various types. We pay special attention to fixing null pointer dereference since it is the most important and sophisticated defect type among those we've supported. Statistics on fixes proposed for defects of this type is also provided. We discuss common limitations and other specificity of our task and explain why we cannot use existing automatic fixing tools for solving it. At the end we outline further steps of development of our tool.

Keywords: automatic program repair, automatic defect fixing, static analysis, code defects, null pointer dereference.

DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2021-33(6)-6