CXXCrafter: An LLM-Based Agent for Automated C/C++ Open Source Software Building

TL;DR

This paper introduces CXXCrafter, an LLM-based agent designed to automate the complex process of building C/C++ open source projects, addressing dependency management and error handling to improve success rates.

Contribution

It presents the first systematic analysis of C/C++ build challenges and develops an LLM-powered system that automates project building with a 78% success rate on open-source projects.

Findings

Most C/C++ projects encounter around five build errors with default systems.

CXXCrafter successfully builds 78% of projects in the evaluation.

The system outperforms manual building in certain cases.

Abstract

Project building is pivotal to support various program analysis tasks, such as generating intermediate rep- resentation code for static analysis and preparing binary code for vulnerability reproduction. However, automating the building process for C/C++ projects is a highly complex endeavor, involving tremendous technical challenges, such as intricate dependency management, diverse build systems, varied toolchains, and multifaceted error handling mechanisms. Consequently, building C/C++ projects often proves to be difficult in practice, hindering the progress of downstream applications. Unfortunately, research on facilitating the building of C/C++ projects remains to be inadequate. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers promising solutions to automated software building. Trained on extensive corpora, LLMs can help unify diverse build systems through their comprehension capabilities and address complex errors by leveraging tacit knowledge storage. Moreover, LLM-based agents can be systematically designed to dynamically interact with the environment, effectively managing dynamic building issues. Motivated by these opportunities, we first conduct an empirical study to systematically analyze the current challenges in the C/C++ project building process. Particularly, we observe that most popular C/C++ projects encounter an average of five errors when relying solely on the default build systems. Based on our study, we develop an automated build system called CXXCrafter to specifically address the above-mentioned challenges, such as dependency resolution. Our evaluation on open-source software demonstrates that CXXCrafter achieves a success rate of 78% in project building. Specifically, among the Top100 dataset, 72 projects are built successfully by both CXXCrafter and manual efforts, 3 by CXXCrafter only, and 14 manually only. ...