Binary-level Software Compatibility Tool Agreement

Abstract: Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatibility is essential for system or software updates to ensure that libraries continue to function. Tools that can assess a binary or library ABI can thus be used to make predictions about compatibility, and predict downstream bugs by informing developers and users about issues. In this work, we are interested in describing a set of well-known tools for assessing ABI, and testing them in a controlled set experiments to assess tool agreement. We run 7660 smaller experiments across tools (N=30,640 total results) to evaluate not only predictions, but also each tool's ability to provide detail about underlying issues. In this work, along with highlighting the problem of assessing ABI compatibility and critiquing the pros and cons of currently available tools, we provide guidance to developers interested to test ABI based on our empirical results and suggestions for future work.