2,246 papers · page 61 of 113
State-of-the-art dynamic bug detectors such as data race and memory leak detectors report program locations that are likely causes of bugs. However, programmers need more than static program locations to understand the behavior of increasingly complex and concurrent software. Dyn…
Emerging mobile applications that sense context are poised to delight and entertain us with timely news and events, health tracking, and social connections. Unfortunately, sensing algorithms quickly drain the phone's battery. Developers can overcome battery drain by carefully opt…
We describe techniques for synthesis and verification of recursive functional programs over unbounded domains. Our techniques build on top of an algorithm for satisfiability modulo recursive functions, a framework for deductive synthesis, and complete synthesis procedures for alg…
Symbolic execution is a promising testing and analysis methodology. It systematically explores a program's execution space and can generate test cases with high coverage. One significant practical challenge for symbolic execution is how to effectively explore the enormous number …
Some programming languages become widely popular while others fail to grow beyond their niche or disappear altogether. This paper uses survey methodology to identify the factors that lead to language adoption. We analyze large datasets, including over 200,000 SourceForge projects…
As more applications migrate to the cloud, and as "big data" edges into even more production environments, the performance and simplicity of exchanging data between compute nodes/devices is increasing in importance. An issue central to distributed programming, yet often under-con…
When resolving performance problems, a simple histogram of hot call stacks does not cut it, especially given the highly fluid nature of modern deployments. Why bother tuning, when adding a few CPUs via the management console will quickly resolve the problem? The findings of these…
The performance of parallel code significantly depends on the parallel task granularity (PTG). If the PTG is too coarse, performance suffers due to load imbalance; if the PTG is too fine, performance suffers from the overhead that is induced by parallel task creation and scheduli…
Writing low-level concurrent software has traditionally required intimate knowledge of the entire toolchain and often has involved coding in assembly. New language standards have extended C and C++ with support for low-level atomic operations and a weak memory model, enabling dev…
We present a small-step operational semantics for the Python programming language. We present both a core language for Python, suitable for tools and proofs, and a translation process for converting Python source to this core. We have tested the composition of translation and eva…
Algorithmic speculation or high-level speculation is a promising programming paradigm which allows programmers to speculatively branch an execution into multiple independent parallel sections and then choose the best (perhaps fastest) amongst them. The continuing execution after …
Refactoring has become an integral part of modern software development, with wide support in popular integrated development environments (IDEs). Modern IDEs provide a fixed set of supported refactorings, listed in a refactoring menu. But with IDEs supporting more and more refacto…
Like shared-memory multi-threaded programs, event-driven programs such as client-side web applications are susceptible to data races that are hard to reproduce and debug. Race detection for such programs is hampered by their pervasive use of ad hoc synchronization, which can lead…
Providing security guarantees for systems built out of untrusted components requires the ability to define and enforce access control policies over untrusted code. In Web 2.0 applications, JavaScript code from different origins is often combined on a single page, leading to well-…
Debugging and analyzing a snapshot of a crashed program's memory is far more difficult than working with a live program, because debuggers can no longer execute code to help make sense of the program state. We present an architecture that supports the restricted execution of ordi…
Despite some clear advantages and recent advances, reference counting remains a poor cousin to high-performance tracing garbage collectors. The advantages of reference counting include a) immediacy of reclamation, b) incrementality, and c) local scope of its operations. After dec…
Formal program verification offers strong assurance of correctness, backed by the strength of mathematical proof. Constructing these proofs requires humans to identify program invariants, and show that they are always maintained. These invariants are then used to prove that the c…
We present set-based pre-analysis: a virtually universal optimization technique for flow-insensitive points-to analysis. Points-to analysis computes a static abstraction of how object values flow through a program's variables. Set-based pre-analysis relies on the observation that…
In a common use case for cloud computing, clients upload data and computation to servers that are managed by a third-party infrastructure provider. We describe MrCrypt, a system that provides data confidentiality in this setting by executing client computations on encrypted data.…
Applications written for distributed-memory parallel architectures must partition their data to enable parallel execution. As memory hierarchies become deeper, it is increasingly necessary that the data partitioning also be hierarchical to match. Current language proposals perfor…