Hacking On Mull¶

Note

Looking for help? We’ve got you covered! ❤️

Internals¶

Before you start hacking it may be helpful to get through the second and third sections of this paper: Mull it over: mutation testing based on LLVM from ICST 2018.

Development Setup using Vagrant¶

Mull supplies a number of ready to use virtual machines based on VirtualBox.

The machines are managed using Vagrant and Ansible.

Do the following steps to setup a virtual machine:

cd infrastructure
vagrant up debian

This command will:

setup a virtual machine
install required packages (cmake, sqlite3, pkg-config, …)
download precompiled version of LLVM
build Mull against the LLVM
run Mull’s test suite
run Mull against OpenSSL and fmtlib as an integration test

Once the machine is up and running you can start hacking over SSH:

vagrant ssh debian

Within the virtual machine Mull’s sources located under /opt/mull.

Alternatively, you can setup a remote toolchain within your IDE, if it supports it.

When you are done feel free to drop the virtual machine:

vagrant destroy debian

You can see the full list of supplied VMs by running this command:

vagrant status

Local Development Setup¶

You can replicate all the steps managed by Vagrant/Ansible manually.

Required packages¶

Please, look at the corresponding Ansible playbook (debian-playbook.yaml, macos-playbook.yaml, etc.) for the list of packages required on your OS.

LLVM¶

You need LLVM to build and debug Mull. You can use any LLVM version between 11.0 and 15.0.

As of the version 0.14.0, Mull can be compiled against LLVM/Clang available through your package manager (e.g. apt or homebrew).

Build Mull¶

Create a build folder and initialize build system:

git clone https://github.com/mull-project/mull.git --recursive
cd mull
mkdir build.dir
cd build.dir
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<cmake search paths> ..
make mull-runner-12
make mull-tests

The cmake search paths should point to the LLVM/Clang CMake config folders. Some examples:

llvm@12 installed via homebrew on macOS: "/usr/local/opt/llvm@12/lib/cmake/llvm/;/usr/local/opt/llvm@12/lib/cmake/clang/"

llvm-12 installed via apt on Ubuntu: "/usr/lib/llvm-13/cmake/;/usr/lib/cmake/clang-13/"

If you are getting linker errors, then it is very likely related to the C++ ABI. Depending on your OS/setup you may need to tweak the _GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI (0 or 1):

cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=<cmake search paths> -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0 ..

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