Go the Extra Mile: Fixing Propagated Error-Handling Bugs
Haoran Liu, Zhouyang Jia, Huiping Zhou, Haifang Zhou, Shanshan Li · 2024
Error handling bugs are widespread in software, compromising its reliability. In C/C++ environments, error-handling bugs are often propagated to multiple functions through return values. This paper introduces EH-Fixer, a conversation-based automated method for fixing propagated error-handling (PEH) bugs. EH-Fixer employs LLM in a conversation style, utilizing information retrieval to address PEH bugs. We constructed a dataset containing 30 PEH bugs and evaluated EH-Fixer against two state-of-the-art approaches. Preliminary results indicate that EH-Fixer successfully fixed 19 more PEH bugs than existing approaches.