ISSTA 2024
Mon 16 - Fri 20 September 2024 Vienna, Austria
co-located with ISSTA/ECOOP 2024
Fri 20 Sep 2024 10:30 - 10:50 at EI 10 Fritz Paschke - Compilers and Decompilers Chair(s): Sang Kil Cha

TeX is a widely-used typesetting system adopted by most publishers and professional societies. While TeX is responsible for generating a significant number of documents, irregularities in the TeX ecosystem may produce inconsistent documents. These inconsistencies may occur across different TeX engines or different versions of TeX distributions, resulting in failures to adhere to formatting specifications, or the same document rendering differently for different authors. In this work, we investigate and quantify the robustness of the TeX ecosystem through a large-scale study of 432 documents. We developed an automated pipeline to evaluate the cross-engine and cross-version compatibility of the TeX ecosystem. We found significant inconsistencies in the outputs of different TeX engines: only 0.2% of documents compiled to identical output with XeTeX and PDFTeX due to a lack of cross-engine support in popular LaTeX packages and classes used in academic conferences. A smaller—yet significant—extent of inconsistencies was found across different TeX Live distributions, with only 42.1% of documents producing the same output from 2020 to 2023. Our automated pipeline additionally reduces the human effort in bug-finding: from a sample of 10 unique root causes of inconsistencies, we identified two new bugs in LaTeX packages and five existing bugs that were fixed independently of this study. We also observed potentially unintended inconsistencies across different TeX Live distributions beyond the updates listed in changelogs. We expect that this study will help authors of TeX documents to avoid unexpected outcomes by understanding how they may be affected by the often undocumented subtleties of the TeX ecosystem, while benefiting developers by demonstrating how different implementations result in unintended inconsistencies.

Fri 20 Sep

Displayed time zone: Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Rome, Stockholm, Vienna change

10:30 - 11:50
Compilers and DecompilersTechnical Papers at EI 10 Fritz Paschke
Chair(s): Sang Kil Cha KAIST
10:30
20m
Talk
Inconsistencies in TeX-Produced Documents
Technical Papers
Jovyn Tan National University of Singapore, Manuel Rigger National University of Singapore
DOI Pre-print
10:50
20m
Talk
Fuzzing MLIR Compiler Infrastructure via Operation Dependency Analysis
Technical Papers
Chenyao Suo Tianjin University, Junjie Chen Tianjin University, Shuang Liu Renmin University of China, Jiajun Jiang Tianjin University, Yingquan Zhao Tianjin University, Jianrong Wang Tianjin University
DOI
11:10
20m
Talk
Towards Understanding the Bugs in Solidity Compiler
Technical Papers
Haoyang Ma Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Wuqi Zhang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Qingchao Shen Tianjin University, Yongqiang Tian Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Junjie Chen Tianjin University, Shing-Chi Cheung Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
DOI
11:30
20m
Talk
Uncovering and Mitigating the Impact of Code Obfuscation on Dataset Annotation with Antivirus Engines
Technical Papers
Gao Cuiying Huazhong University of Science and Technology; JD.com, Yueming Wu Nanyang Technological University, Heng Li Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wei Yuan Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Haoyu Jiang Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Qidan He JD.com, Yang Liu Nanyang Technological University
DOI

Information for Participants
Fri 20 Sep 2024 10:30 - 11:50 at EI 10 Fritz Paschke - Compilers and Decompilers Chair(s): Sang Kil Cha
Info for room EI 10 Fritz Paschke:

Map: https://tuw-maps.tuwien.ac.at/?q=CAEG31

Room tech: https://raumkatalog.tiss.tuwien.ac.at/room/13948