REregehr·Sep 20, 2015
Quest was a much earlier tool (ca. 2005) with similar goals:
https://github.com/lindig/quest
In Calling conventions are hard – fuzz themlindig
quest
C2014–2015
lindig / quest
quest
A tool for testing C compilers automatically
2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
23GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A tool for testing C compilers automatically
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:03:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-08-03 08:32:53 UTC to 2015-09-20 09:15:41 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 2014 | 2014-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Sep 2014 | 2014-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2014 | 2014-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2014 | 2014-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2014 | 2014-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2015 | 2015-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2015 | 2015-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2015 | 2015-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| May 2015 | 2015-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jun 2015 | 2015-06-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jul 2015 | 2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Aug 2015 | 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2015 | 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesIf your are looking for code to break a C compiler, you can try my tool Quest https://github.com/lindig/quest. It tries to to generate code that shows that a C compiler handles parameter passing wrong. I usually run it in a loop, like here on Mac OS X 10.9.4 witch gcc:
:quest $ gcc --version
Configured with: --prefix=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Apple LLVM version 5.1 (clang-503.0.40) (based on LLVM 3.4svn)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin13.3.0
Thread model: posix
:quest $ while true; do
> ./main.native -test gcc -n 1 > foo.c
> gcc -O2 -o foo foo.c
> ./foo || break
> echo -n .
> done
................................................................
................................................................
....
Read the rest
.............................................
Assertion failed: (b32 == b43), function callee_b0f, file foo.c, line 128.
Abort trap: 6
This means the tool found C code where parameter passing is not compiled properly. It took about 10 seconds to find this. The test case is pretty small:
:quest $ wc foo.c
140 444 3485 foo.c
The generated code that where the assertion checks that parameters are received correctly looks like this:
static
union bt8 *
callee_b0f(struct bt4 *bp7,
double *bp8,
struct bt6 bp9,
float bp10,
struct bt7 bp11,
double bp12,
short int bp13,
...)
{
va_list ap;
typedef int bd0;
typedef struct bt0 bd1;
typedef int bd2;
typedef union bt3 bd3;
bd0 b41;
bd1 b42;
bd2 b43;
bd3 b44;
/* seed: 2040 */
va_start(ap, bp13);
QUEST_ASSERT(b34 == bp7);
QUEST_ASSERT(b35 == bp8);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b18 == bp9.b24.b18);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b19 == bp9.b24.b19);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b20 == bp9.b24.b20);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b21 == bp9.b24.b21);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b22 == bp9.b24.b22);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b24.b23 == bp9.b24.b23);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b25 == bp9.b25);
QUEST_ASSERT(b36.b26 == bp9.b26);
QUEST_ASSERT(b37 == bp10);
QUEST_ASSERT(b38.b27 == bp11.b27);
QUEST_ASSERT(b39 == bp12);
QUEST_ASSERT(b40 == bp13);
b41 = va_arg(ap, bd0);
b42 = va_arg(ap, bd1);
b43 = va_arg(ap, bd2);
b44 = va_arg(ap, bd3);
QUEST_ASSERT(b30 == b41);
QUEST_ASSERT(b31.b0 == b42.b0);
QUEST_ASSERT(b32 == b43);
QUEST_ASSERT(b33.b10.b1 == b44.b10.b1);
va_end(ap);
return b29;
}