CCmutator: A Mutation Generator for Concurrency Constructs in Multithreaded C/C plus plus Applications

We introduce CCmutator, a mutation generation tool for multithreaded C/C++ programs written using POSIX threads and the recently standardized C++11 concurrency constructs. CCmutator is capable of performing partial mutations and generating higher order mutants, which allow for more focused and complex combinations of elementary mutation operators leading to higher quality mutants. We have implemented CCmutator based on the popular Clang/LLVM compiler framework, which allows CCmutator to be extremely scalable and robust in handling real-world C/C++ applications. CCmutator is also designed in such a way that all mutants of the same order can be generated in parallel, which allows the tool to be easily parallelized on commodity multicore hardware to improve performance.