miscompile

miscompile

English

Etymology

mis- +‎ compile

Verb

miscompile (third-person singular simple present miscompiles, present participle miscompiling, simple past and past participle miscompiled)

1. To compile (put together) incorrectly.
   • 1980, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Dept. of the Interior and Related Agencies, Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations For 1981, page 1283:

     Sufficient data is turned into the Agency but as this data is reviewed and forwarded to area and Central information systems, it seems to get miscompiled through this bureaucratic process.

   • 1994, Rāshṭriya Nirvācana Paryavekshaṇa Samiti, Nepāla, Nepal election observation report: mid-term polls, page 147:

     We found that there were many complaints by the agents and the voters of miscompiled rolls.

   • 2009, Steven Rosefielde, ‎Stefan Hedlund, Russia Since 1980, page 151:

     It knows how to falsify, to edit, and to miscompile statistics but shouldn't be able to raise living standards to the West's moving average, nor achieve social justice, empowerment, and freedom.

2. To compile (generate executable from source code) incorrectly.
   • 1990, Lance J. Hoffman, Rogue programs: viruses, worms, and Trojan horses, page 125:

     The replacement code would miscompile the login command so that it would accept either the intended encrypted password or a particular known password.

   • 2001, Kevin Bowyer, Ethics and Computing: Living Responsibly in a Computerized World, page 101:

     Figure 3.2 shows a simple modification to the compiler that will deliberately miscompile source whenever a particular pattern is matched. If this were not deliberate, it would be called a compiler "bug." Since it is deliberate, it should be called a "Trojan horse".

   • 2012, Jack Ganssle, The Art of Programming Embedded Systems, page 28:

     How often did the compiler crash, miscompile, or unexpectedly cost engineering time?