Outputting args to the specimin root

[jonathan-m-phillips]

Running ASHE on dryrun mode, I have noticed that Specimin is outputting many .args files to my Specimin root.

For instance: javac.20240505_174741.args

Where the contents inside are:

-d
/temp/dir
-sourcepath
/my/root/checker-framework/framework/src/main/java
/my/root/checker-framework/framework/src/main/java/org/checkerframework/common/value/ValueCheckerUtils.java
-Xmaxerrs
0

I replaced the actual directories with/temp/dir and /my/root.

This is just one example, but I have 1,500 in the root. I first noticed it the other day and had ~5,000+ in there before deleting them.

Is this specifically a Specimin issue?

[kelloggm]

These files are created by the Java compiler (javac) when it encounters an internal exception. What that probably means is that when Specimin is invoking the compiler, sometimes the compiler itself is crashing.

There are a few possible reasons for this:

• Specimin is doing something wrong in how it invokes the compiler (most likely)
• Specimin has exposed one or more bugs in javac (less likely, but very plausible)

I think the next step here is to write some debugging code in Specimin that will allow us to capture the exception from javac. I'll try to do that soon, so that we can re-run Specimin on the target's producing so many of these .args files and see what's happening.