Fixing Bugs, But Bypassing the Source Code

shreshtha contributes this snippet from MIT's Technology Review: "Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT, is unabashed about the ultimate goal of his group's research: 'delivering an immortal, invulnerable program.' In work presented this month at the ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in Big Sky, MT, his group has developed software that can find and fix certain types of software bugs within a matter of minutes." Interestingly, this software doesn't need access to the source code of the target program.

Comments

Did they use that tool to develop that tool?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

My friend developed an automatic code quality estimation program for his masters thesis. It will basically find average the number of lines per function, ratio of code to comment, and other such metrics and give a letter grade to the code. The fiendish prof announced that he will run that code through itself. Whatever letter grade it spits out will be his thesis grade. He got a D. He begged and cried and threw a hissy fit and wangled a B and scraped through the degree.

I wonder if we should turn that software loose on itself and see what it finds.