ComBench: A Repo-level Real-world Benchmark for Compilation Error Repair
Organizations: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China · School of Software Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, China · Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China
Abstract
Compilation errors pose pervasive and critical challenges in software development, significantly hindering productivity. Therefore, Automated Compilation Error Repair (ACER) techniques are proposed to mitigate these issues. Despite recent advancements in ACER, its real-world performance remains poorly evaluated. This can be largely attributed to the limitations of existing benchmarks, \ie decontextualized single-file data, lack of authentic source diversity, and biased local task modeling that ignores crucial repository-level complexities. To bridge this critical gap, we propose ComBench, the first repository-level, reproducible real-world benchmark for C/C++ compilation error repair. ComBench is constructed through a novel, automated framework that systematically mines real-world failures from the GitHub CI histories of large-scale open-source projects. Our framework contributes techniques for the high-precision identification of ground-truth repair patches from complex version histories and a high-fidelity mechanism for reproducing the original, ephemeral build environments. To ensure data quality, all samples in ComBench are execution-verified -- guaranteeing reproducible failures and build success with ground-truth patches. Using ComBench, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 12 modern LLMs under both direct and agent-based repair settings. Our experiments reveal a significant gap between a model's ability to achieve syntactic correctness (a 73% success rate for GPT-5) and its ability to ensure semantic correctness (only 41% of its patches are valid). We also find that different models exhibit distinct specializations for different error types. ComBench provides a robust and realistic platform to guide the future development of ACER techniques capable of addressing the complexities of modern software development.
Figures & tables
| Category | Description | |
| Warning as Error | Warnings that are elevated to errors by compiler flags ( e.g. , -Werror ). | |
| Declaration Error | Problems with undefined, redeclared, or conflicting identifiers ( e.g. , symbols, namespaces). | |
| Type Error | Violations of the C++ type system, such as mismatches, invalid conversions, or incomplete types. | |
| Syntax Error | Issues related to code grammar and structure, like unexpected tokens or missing punctuation. | |
| Template Error | Errors specific to C++ templates, such as instantiation or argument deduction issues. | |
| Member Error | Issues with accessing or defining members of classes, including access specifier violations. |
| Repository | Language | LoC | Files | Commits | Workflow Runs | Compilation Errors | Avg. Dependent Files per Error |
| Bitcoin ( Bitcoin Core developers, 2009 ) | C++ | ||||||
| OpenSSL ( The OpenSSL Project, 1998 ) | C | ||||||
| RocksDB ( Facebook, 2012 ) | C++ | ||||||
| LLVM ( The LLVM Project, 2003 ) | C++ | ||||||
| Total | 1,418,014 | 69,507 | 648,746 | 1,368,539 | 200 | 204 |
| Project | Raw Log for Failed Job | Extracted Compilation Error | Repair Patch Identification | Deduplication | Success Reproduction |
| Bitcoin ( Bitcoin Core developers, 2009 ) | 585 | 121 | 76 | 42 | 12 |
| OpenSSL ( The OpenSSL Project, 1998 ) | 3938 | 162 | 27 | 19 | 19 |
| RocksDB ( Facebook, 2012 ) | 2240 | 265 | 146 | 86 | 64 |
| LLVM ( The LLVM Project, 2003 ) | 5004 | 4412 | 168 | 115 | 105 |
| Total | 11,767 | 4,960 | 417 | 262 | 200 |
| Open-source Models | Closed-source Models | ||||||
| Model | Size | Context | Output | Model | Size | Context | Output |
| DeepSeek-V3 ( AI, 2025 ) | 671B | 128K | 8,192 | GPT-5 ( OpenAI, 2025b ) | - | 272K | 128,000 |
| Qwen3-235B-A22b ( Yang et al., 2025 ) | 235B (22B active) | 128K | 8,192 | GPT-4.1 ( OpenAI, 2025a ) | - | 1M | 32,768 |
| Qwen3-30B-A3b ( Yang et al., 2025 ) | 30B (3B active) | 128K | 8,192 | Claude 4 Sonnet ( Anthropic, 2025c ) | - | 200K | 16,384 |
| Qwen3 (4/8/14/32B) ( Yang et al., 2025 ) | 4/8/14/32B | 128K | 8,192 | Claude 3.7 Sonnet ( Anthropic, 2025b ) | - | 128K | 16,384 |
| Gemini 2.5 Pro ( Google, 2025a ) | - | 1M | 64,000 | ||||
| Model | bitcoin (12) | openssl (19) | rocksdb (64) | llvm (105) | Total (200) | ||||||||||
| CS | SC | EM | CS | SC | EM | CS | SC | EM | CS | SC | EM | CS | SC | EM | |
| Proprietary Models | |||||||||||||||
| GPT-5 | 9 | 3 | 1 | 15 | 8 | 6 | 41 | 23 | 12 | 81 | 48 | 21 | 146 | 82 | 40 |
| GPT-4.1 | 4 | 2 | 0 | 12 | 7 | 6 | 37 | 20 | 12 | 61 | 35 | 15 | 114 | 64 | 33 |
| Claude-Sonnet-4 | 7 | 3 | 1 | 12 | 8 | 6 | 36 | 22 | 13 | 59 | 35 | 21 | 114 | 68 | 41 |
| Claude 3.7 Sonnet | 7 | 1 | 0 | 10 | 5 | 5 | 35 | 19 | 11 | 55 | 32 | 16 | 107 | 57 | 32 |
Automated Program Repair
Automated program repair develops methods that locate software faults and produce validated fixes with limited human effort.
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