ISSTA 2024
Mon 16 - Fri 20 September 2024 Vienna, Austria
co-located with ISSTA/ECOOP 2024

This program is tentative and subject to change.

Fri 20 Sep 2024 10:30 - 10:50 at EI 10 Fritz Paschke - Compilers and Decompilers

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.

This program is tentative and subject to change.

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
10:30
20m
Talk
Inconsistencies in TeX-produced Documents
Technical Papers
Jovyn Tan National University of Singapore, Manuel Rigger National University of Singapore
Pre-print
10:50
20m
Talk
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Decompilers
Technical Papers
Ying Cao Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Runze Zhang Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ruigang Liang Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kai Chen Institute of Information Engineering at Chinese Academy of Sciences
DOI
11:10
20m
Talk
Fuzzing MLIR Compiler Infrastructure via Operation Dependency Analysis
Technical Papers
Chenyao Suo College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University, Junjie Chen Tianjin University, Shuang Liu Renmin University of China, Jiajun Jiang Tianjin University, Yingquan Zhao Tianjin University, Jianrong Wang College of Intelligence and Computing, Tianjin University
11:30
20m
Talk
Towards Understanding the Bugs in Solidity Compiler
Technical Papers
Haoyang Ma Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Wuqi Zhang The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Qingchao Shen Tianjin University, Yongqiang Tian The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Junjie Chen Tianjin University, Shing-Chi Cheung Hong Kong University of Science and Technology