ExeBench: an ML-scale dataset of executable C functions

Jordi Armengol-Estapé, Jackson Woodruff, Alexander Brauckmann, José Wesley de Souza Magalhães, Michael F. P. O'Boyle

Abstract: Machine-learning promises to transform compilation and software engineering, yet is frequently limited by the scope of available datasets. In particular, there is a lack of runnable, real-world datasets required for a range of tasks ranging from neural program synthesis to machine learning-guided program optimization. We introduce a new dataset, ExeBench, which attempts to address this. It tackles two key issues with real-world code: references to external types and functions and scalable generation of IO examples. ExeBench is the first publicly available dataset that pairs real-world C code taken from GitHub with IO examples that allow these programs to be run. We develop a toolchain that scrapes GitHub, analyzes the code, and generates runnable snippets of code. We analyze our benchmark suite using several metrics, and show it is representative of real-world code. ExeBench contains 4.5M compilable and 700k executable C functions. This scale of executable, real functions will enable the next generation of machine learning-based programming tasks.