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Fixing Bugs, But Bypassing the Source Code

Posted by timothy on from the wrapping-puzzles-in-enigmas dept.

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.

6 of 234 comments (clear)

  1. I sure wouldn't by Korbeau · · Score: 5, Funny

    run this software before running ClearView on it first. Imagine what this could do if it had a bug in its code!

  2. Re:MS will probably kill it by SnarfQuest · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If MS included this in Windows, you'd never get to see the login screen because the CPU would be so busy fixing bugs.

    --
    Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
  3. Did they use that tool to develop that tool? by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:Did they use that tool to develop that tool? by Wonko+the+Sane · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Fiendish? What could possibly be more fair and objective than making him eat his own dogfood?

  4. Re:clearview by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    So run two.

  5. Re:MS will probably kill it by mewsenews · · Score: 5, Funny

    If MS included this in Windows, you'd never get to see the login screen because the CPU would be so busy fixing bugs.

    Geez... imagine the sheer volume of .CONF files a Linux user would have to waft through just to get this to check a distro for bugs.

    Is this some sort of "out-stereotype the operating system" competition? If so, here is my entry:

    If the tool from TFA existed already, Mac users wouldn't notice it until Steve Jobs named it the iPatcher and made some cutesy advertisements with Justin Long wearing an eye patch. At that point they'd proclaim it made their systems invulnerable to bugs in a far superior way than Windows and Linux.