An Empirical Study on Bugs in Rust Programming Language
Sijie Yu, Ziyuan Wang · 2024
Rust is a young systems programming language that is type and memory safe. Despite Rust’s design focus on safety and correctness, bugs are inevitable in any software system, and Rust is no exception. By analyzing 10097 bug reports and 9360 related revisions in the Rust language, we found that the bugs are extremely unevenly distributed in components and source files; most of the general language features involved in Rust language bugs are Data types, Expressions and Assignment Statements, Rust-specific language features are mainly related to Traits and Ownership Systems; the main symptom of bugs is Internal Compilation Error (ICE); The bug fix work is not complicated; there is a significant correlation between priority and fix time; Semantic bugs are the most common root cause of bugs. These findings reveal some basic patterns of bugs in the Rust language, which can provide some help to Rust developers and maintainers to improve the quality of the Rust language and provide a better programming experience for users of Rust language.