Dynamic patch generation for null pointer exceptions using metaprogramming

Null pointer exceptions (NPE) are the number one cause of uncaught crashing exceptions in production. In this paper, we aim at exploring the search space of possible patches for null pointer exceptions with metaprogramming. Our idea is to transform the program under repair with automated code transformation, so as to obtain a metaprogram. This metaprogram contains automatically injected hooks, that can be activated to emulate a null pointer exception patch. This enables us to perform a fine-grain analysis of the runtime context of null pointer exceptions. We set up an experiment with 16 real null pointer exceptions that have happened in the field. We compare the effectiveness of our metaprogramming approach against simple templates for repairing null pointer exceptions.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering

• Publication date

  2017-02-21

• Fields of study

  Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1109/SANER.2017.7884635arXiv 1812.00409
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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