PanicFI: An Infrastructure for Fixing Panic Bugs in Real-World Rust Programs

Abstract: The Rust programming language has garnered significant attention due to its robust safety features and memory management capabilities. Despite its guaranteed memory safety, Rust programs suffer from runtime errors that are unmanageable, i.e., panic errors. Notably, traditional memory issues such as null pointer dereferences, which are prevalent in other languages, are less likely to be triggered in Rust due to its strict ownership rules. However, the unique nature of Rust's panic bugs, which arise from the language's stringent safety and ownership paradigms, presents a distinct challenge. Over half of the bugs in rustc, Rust's own compiler, are attributable to crash stemming from panic errors. However, addressing Rust panic bugs is challenging and requires significant effort, as existing fix patterns are not directly applicable due to the design and feature of Rust language.Therefore, developing foundational infrastructure, including datasets, fixing patterns, and automated repair tools, is both critical and urgent. This paper introduces a comprehensive infrastructure, namely PanicFI, aimed at providing supports for understanding Rust panic bugs and developing automated techniques. In PanicFI, we construct a dataset, Panic4R, comprising 102 real panic bugs and their fixes from the top 500 most-downloaded open-source crates.Then, through an analysis of the Rust compiler implementation , we identify Rust-specific patterns for fixing panic bugs, providing insights and guidance for generating patches. Moreover, we develop PanicKiller, the first automated tool for fixing Rust panic bugs, which has already contributed to the resolution of 28 panic bugs in open-source projects.The practicality and efficiency of PanicKiller confirm the effectiveness of the patterns mined within PanicFI.