Recompilation Is Not Enough: Test-Guided Decompiled-C Repair

Abstract:Decompiled C often becomes recompilable only after repair, but recompilation alone does not establish test-observed behavior. A recompiled command-line binary can still parse options incorrectly, print different bytes, or return a different exit status. We present a few-step workflow for repairing decompiled C using compiler feedback and related official tests. Compiler and linker diagnostics first guide build repair. Once the repaired C recompiles into a binary, smoke checks and related official tests expose behavioral discrepancies for semantic repair. In a preliminary static-enriched evaluation on 104 Coreutils 9.5 binaries with available decompiler exports and deterministic exact-output smoke comparisons, 91 binaries (87.5%) recompile and pass the test gate; 9 do not recompile within the repair budget, and 4 recompile but still fail the test gate. The result suggests that test-gate feedback can make LLM-assisted repair of decompiled C more auditable than compile-only recovery.

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)

arXiv:2609.07201 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.07201v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.07201 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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