2,246 papers · page 60 of 113
The machine representation of floating point values has limited precision such that errors may be introduced during execution. These errors may get propagated and magnified by the following operations, leading to instability problems, e.g., control flow path may be undesirably al…
We propose constraining multithreaded execution to small sets of input-covering schedules, which we define as follows: given a program P, we say that a set of schedules ∑ covers all inputs of program P if, when given any input, P's execution can be constrained to some schedule in…
Framework based software tends to get bloated by accumulating optional features (or concerns) just-in-case they are needed. The good news is that such feature bloat need not always cause runtime execution bloat. The bad news is that often enough, only a few statements from an opt…
Understanding and analyzing multi-threaded program performance and scalability is far from trivial, which severely complicates parallel software development and optimization. In this paper, we present bottle graphs, a powerful analysis tool that visualizes multi-threaded program …
Dynamically typed language implementations often use more memory and execute slower than their statically typed cousins, in part because operations on collections of elements are unoptimised. This paper describes storage strategies, which dynamically optimise collections whose el…
Parallel programming is essential for reaping the benefits of parallel hardware, but it is notoriously difficult to develop and debug reliable, scalable software systems. One key challenge is that modern languages and systems provide poor support for ensuring concurrency correctn…
Emerging high-performance architectures are anticipated to contain unreliable components that may exhibit soft errors, which silently corrupt the results of computations. Full detection and masking of soft errors is challenging, expensive, and, for some applications, unnecessary.…
Smartphones and tablets with rich graphical user interfaces (GUI) are becoming increasingly popular. Hundreds of thousands of specialized applications, called apps, are available for such mobile platforms. Manual testing is the most popular technique for testing graphical user in…
Data-dependent GPU kernels, whose data or control flow are dependent on the input of the program, are difficult to verify because they require reasoning about shared state manipulated by many parallel threads. Existing verification techniques for GPU kernels achieve soundness and…
Disposal of dead actors in actor-model languages is as important as disposal of unreachable objects in object-oriented languages. In current practice, programmers are required to either manually terminate actors, or they have to rely on garbage collection systems that monitor act…
Eliminating concurrency errors is increasingly important as systems rely more on parallelism for performance. Exhaustively exploring the state-space of a program's thread interleavings finds concurrency errors and provides coverage guarantees, but suffers from exponential state-s…
Identifying the hottest paths in the control flow graph of a routine can direct optimizations to portions of the code where most resources are consumed. This powerful methodology, called path profiling, was introduced by Ball and Larus in the mid 90's [4] and has received conside…
The C++ programming language remains widely used, despite inheriting many unsafe features from C---features that often lead to failures of type or memory safety that manifest as buffer overflows, use-after-free vulnerabilities, or abstraction violations. Malicious attackers can e…
In the multi-core era, it is critical to efficiently test multi-threaded software and expose concurrency bugs before software release. Previous work has made significant progress in detecting and validating concurrency bugs under a given input. Unfortunately, software testing alw…
This paper presents a new method for generating inductive loop invariants that are expressible as boolean combinations of linear integer constraints. The key idea underlying our technique is to perform a backtracking search that combines Hoare-style verification condition generat…
Many languages support behavioral software contracts so that programmers can describe a component's obligations and promises via logical assertions in its interface. The contract system monitors program execution, checks whether the assertions hold, and, if not, blames the guilty…
Modern IDEs support automated refactoring for many programming languages, but support for JavaScript is still primitive. To perform renaming, which is one of the fundamental refactorings, there is often no practical alternative to simple syntactic search-and-replace. Although mor…
We propose DelphJ: a Java-based OO language that eschews inheritance completely, in favor of a combination of class morphing and (deep) delegation. Compared to past delegation approaches, the novel aspect of our design is the ability to emulate the best aspects of inheritance whi…
JavaScript is the most popular language on the web and is a crucial component of HTML5 applications and services that run on consumer platforms ranging from desktops to phones. However, despite ample amount of hardware parallelism available to web applications on such platforms, …
Type systems that permit developers to express themselves more precisely are one of the primary topics in programming language research, as well as in industrial software development. While it seems plausible that an expressive static type system increases developer productivity,…