Are There Language Specific Bug Patterns? Results Obtained from a Case Study Using Mozilla

A lot of information can be obtained from configuration management systems and post-release bug databases like Bugzilla. In this paper we focus on the question whether there are language specific bug patterns in large programs. For this purpose we implemented a system for extracting the necessary information from the Mozilla project files. A comparison of the extracted information with respect to the programming language showed that there are bug patterns specific to programming languages. In particular we found that Java files of the Mozilla project are less error prone than C and C++ files. Moreover, we found out that the bug lifetime when using Java was almost double the lifetime of bugs in C or C++ file.