- author = "Nicolas Harrand and Simon Allier and Marcelino Rodriguez-Cancio and Martin Monperrus and Benoit Baudry",
- title = "A Journey Among {Java} Neutral Program Variants",
- journal = "Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines",
- year = "2019",
- volume = "20",
- number = "4",
- pages = "531--580",
- month = dec,
- keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming, genetic improvement",
- ISSN = "1389-2576",
-
URL = "
https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02533",
-
DOI = "
doi:10.1007/s10710-019-09355-3",
- size = "50 pages",
-
abstract = "Neutral program variants are functionally similar to
an original program, yet implement slightly different
behaviors. Techniques such as approximate computing or
genetic improvement share the intuition that potential
for enhancements lies in these acceptable behavioral
differences (e.g., enhanced performance or
reliability). Yet, the automatic synthesis of neutral
program variants, through speculative transformations
remains a key challenge.
This work aims at characterizing plastic code regions in Java programs, i.e., the areas that are prone to the synthesis of neutral program variants. Our empirical study relies on automatic variations of 6 real-world Java programs. First, we transform these programs with three state-of-the-art speculative transformations: add, replace and delete statements. We get a pool of 23445 neutral variants, from which we gather the following novel insights: developers naturally write code that supports fine-grain behavioral changes; statement deletion is a surprisingly effective speculative transformation; high-level design decisions, such as the choice of a data structure, are natural points that can evolve while keeping functionality.
Second, we design 3 novel speculative transformations, targeted at specific plastic regions. New experiments reveal that respectively 60percent, 58percent and 73percent of the synthesized variants (175688 in total) are neutral and exhibit execution traces that are different from the original.",
-
notes = "3 Java source code mutations: add method invocation,
swap sub type and loop flip (reverse order of
loop).
Presented at the GI Dagstuhl seminar http://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=18052
Also available via http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.02533 (v2)
https://github.com/castor-software/journey-paper-replication
Also known as \cite{DBLP:journals/corr/abs-1901-02533}
",
