Getting started

Cnerator is a C source code generation tool. It can be used to generate large amounts of standard ANSI/ISO C source code, ready to be compiled by any standard language implementation. Cnerator is highly customizable to generate all the syntactic constructs of the C language, necessary to build accurate predictive models with machine learning algorithms.

Installation

You need a Python 3.7+ standard implementation. The only additional package to install is numpy:

pip install numpy

Usage

Then, you may just run Cnerator with no arguments to generate a random C program in the out directory:

python cnerator.py

There are plenty of options to customize Cnerator. To specify the probability of a particular language construct, you can use the -p or --probs option. The following command sets to 20% the probability of generating a function invocation when a new expression is required:

python cnerator.py -p "call_prob = {True: 0.2, False: 0.8}"

If more sophisticated probabilities are required, you can specify them in a JSON file and pass it as a parameter (see the [documentation](documentation#probability-specification-files) to know the JSON file format). The following line passes an example JSON file in the json/probabilities folder where different probability distributions are specified for some syntactic constructs:

python cnerator.py -P json/probabilities/example_probs.json

Cnerator also provides allows the user to control the number and characteristics of all the functions to be generated. A JSON file is used for that purpose (see the [documentation](documentation#function-generation-files)). The following command makes Cnerator generate one function for each high-level return type in the C programming language:

python cnerator.py -f json/functions/1-function-each-type.json

Sometimes, the user needs the output program to fulfill some requirements not guaranteed by the stochastic generation process. To this aim, Cnerator allows the specification of an ordered collection of Python post-process specification files (see the [documentation](documentation#post-processing-specification-files)). These post-processing files can modify the generated code to satisfy those requirements. The following execution generates a random program and then executes two visitors: one to rename func functions to proc (and their invocations) when they return void; and another one to add a __RETURN__ label before each return statement:

python cnerator.py -V visitors.func_to_proc:visitors.return_instrumentation

To see all the options, just run the -h or --help options.