Code generation models based on the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm have been increasingly attempted by both academia and industry, resulting in well-known industrial models such as Codex, CodeGen, and PanGu-Coder. To evaluate the effectiveness of these models, multiple existing benchmarks (e.g., HumanEval and AiXBench) are proposed, including only cases of generating a standalone function, i.e., a function that may invoke or access only built-in functions and standard libraries. However, standalone functions constitute only about 30% of the functions in popular open-source projects, and evaluating models’ effectiveness on standalone functions cannot reflect their effectiveness on pragmatic code generation scenarios (i.e., code generation for real settings of open source or proprietary code).

To help bridge the preceding gap, in this paper, we propose a benchmark named CoderEval, consisting of 230 Python and 230 Java code generation tasks carefully curated from popular real-world open-source projects and a self-contained execution platform to automatically assess the functional correctness of generated code. CoderEval supports code generation tasks from six levels of context dependency, where context refers to code elements such as types, APIs, variables, and consts defined outside the function under generation but within the dependent third-party libraries, current class, file, or project. CoderEval can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of models in generating code beyond only standalone functions. By evaluating three publicly available state-of-the-art code generation models (CodeGen, PanGu-Coder, and ChatGPT) on CoderEval and HumanEval, we find that the effectiveness of these models in generating standalone functions is substantially higher than that of non-standalone functions. Our analysis highlights the current progress and pinpoints future directions to further improve a model’s effectiveness by leveraging contextual information for pragmatic code generation.