fuzzcheck-rs VS rs_pbrt

Fuzzcheck is a structure-aware fuzzer for rust. "Fuzzing" means feeding large amounts of data into a program and checking for crashes (Fuzzcheck also checks to make sure that all the properties your program should uphold – e.g. a sorting algorithm applied to a list of n items should always return a list of n items – are upheld). Fuzzcheck is an "evolutionary" fuzzer – this means that it generates a set of random inputs, sees what percentage of the program is executed for each input, and keeps inputs which have high levels of percentage of program executed. It then "mutates" these inputs – whereas fuzzers such as AFL/Hongfuzz/etc mutate raw bytes in place (e.g. they swap bytes at different positions, or insert a random byte at a given position to generate inputs similar to the chosen "high coverage" inputs), Fuzzcheck works directly on the Rust types (so it might swap the order of two items in a vec, or randomly insert a new item). It's a really powerful tool for finding lots of bugs.

If you want help with Win support (issues/8) maybe post it here to get it added to TWIR.

I am working on a code coverage viewer for my fuzzer (fuzzcheck). I described what I've done so far in this issue and I am hoping to release the first version within two weeks.

The implications for my fuzzer, fuzzcheck, are huge! Compiling fuzz tests is a lot easier. There should be no more need to create a separate fuzz folder, fuzz tests can be regular #[test] functions, private implementation details can be fuzz-tested as well, rust-analyser works as expected, documentation can be easily generated, etc. I can also attach a human-readable coverage report to every test case :)

Since I graduated, I have had a lot more time to work on fuzzcheck. I am trying to flesh it out, test it, and document it for a new release. It has always felt a bit rushed/experimental and now I am hoping to make it into something solid. I have also played with an egui interface for it, to visualise the tested code coverage, understand how the fuzzer’s decisions are made, and also to interactively tweak the fuzzer’s behaviour. It's a lot of work but it's slowly all coming together! :)

fuzzcheck-rs is really cool. It combines property-testing with fuzzing, getting the nice, structured nature of the former, and the coverage-driven search of the latter, but it works by mutating the structure directly instead of going through a bit string. So if you have a binary tree, going from A(B, C) to A(C, B) can be a single mutation away if that makes sense in your use case, instead of being arbitrarily far away in the bitstring approach.

I just released a first version of blend_info on crates.io. At some point I was working on a similar project on codeberg and I kind of hacked that into rs-pbrt to be able to use some binary Blender .blend files directly as input for my physically based renderer. The executable for that is called parse_blend_file file and details (or a video about it) can be found here. Anyway, the new crate should help parsing any Blender file (independent of the version) and extract information you like to use, kind of cherry picking stuff. I will use the library in a future version of parse_blend_file (as a prove of concept) but want to involve other people early, because they can help me defining a re-usable library, which can be used for many things, not just my renderer. I also started to use sourcehut and investigated how to use CI (building currently for Debian) there, provide mailing lists, and use the (project based) ticket system. Both projects and activity around it can be found here. Most likely I will work on documentation and maybe a blog post about how to use blend_info next. Try to register for one of the mailing lists if you want to contribute and/or create a ticket ...

If somebody is interested in helping with this issue, there is something to learn from the artistic side (Blender users) as well as from the programming side (Rust coders).

https://www.rs-pbrt.org/ - Physically based rendering (PBR) with Rust

Big thanks to wahn/rs_pbrt: Rust crate to implement a counterpart to the PBRT book's (3rd edition) C++ code. See also https://www.rs-pbrt.org/about ... (github.com) and abusch/rustracer: A toy raytracer written in Rust based on PBRT (github.com) which where helpful as references.