[PATCH] D75343: [RFC][debuginfo-tests][dexter] Add a test generation tool

[Jeremy Morse via Phabricator via llvm-commits]

jmorse added a comment.

(NB, I haven't looked at the code as it seems you're requesting feedback for now,)

> We'd really like to get some feedback before investing too much work into this tool. So the question is: What do you think? Is there an upstream interest for this?

I agree with Orlando and Tom, and I think there's definitely a place for this kind of tool to assist with writing tests. Determining what the debug experience _should_ be is hard (as Orlando points out) and probably requires a human to verify, but it'd be helpful to automate the test writing process to avoid boilerplate writing. At the very least, when writing tests we could auto-generate expectations and then customise them to the ones that we're interested in. It's easier to delete the uninteresting stuff than to write the interesting stuff from scratch.

More generally, it'd be great to have additional tooling for comparing debug behaviours between optimisation levels. A while back I had a script that:

- Generated a random test with csmith
- Ran Dexter over it and interpreted some of its error-output to determine what values variables contained at -O0
- Did the same again at -O2
- Examined whether there were any variable values present at -O2 that didn't appear at -O0

Alas it didn't find anything interesting, but applied to a different test suite it could well have. Any development in this kind of direction is helpful IMO.


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https://reviews.llvm.org/D75343