Papers › NPEFix: Automatic Runtime Repair of Null Pointer Exceptions in Java

NPEFix: Automatic Runtime Repair of Null Pointer Exceptions in Java

23 Dec 2015arXiv:1512.07423links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

Benoit Cornu, Thomas Durieux, Lionel Seinturier, Martin Monperrus

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Null pointer exceptions, also known as null dereferences are the number one exceptions in the field. In this paper, we propose 9 alternative execution semantics when a null pointer exception is about to happen. We implement those alternative execution strategies using code transformation in a tool called NPEfix. We evaluate our prototype implementation on 11 field null dereference bugs and 519 seeded failures and show that NPEfix is able to repair at runtime 10/11 and 318/519 failures.

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