Month: June 2017

System programming in Rust: beyond safety

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 20 Comments
System programming in Rust: beyond safety Balasubramanian et al., HotOS'17 Balasubramanian et al. want us to switch all of our systems programming over to Rust. This paper sets out the case. Despite many advances in programming languages, clean-slate operating systems, hypervisors, key-value stores, web servers, network and storage frameworks are still developed in C, a ... Continue Reading

Decoding the representation of code in the brain: an fMRI study of code review and expertise

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment
Decoding the representation of code in the brain: an fMRI study of code review and expertise Floyd et al., ICSE'17 fMRI studies have been used to explore how our brains encode expertise in physical tasks involving specialised motor skills (for example, playing golf), in memory development (for example, London taxi drivers), and in mental skills ... Continue Reading

Node.fz: fuzzing the server-side event-driven architecture

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
Node.fz: Fuzzing the server-side event-driven architecture Davis et al., EuroSys'17 This paper provides a fascinating look at common causes of concurrency bugs in server-side event driven architecture (EDA) based applications. By far the most popular framework supporting this style is Node.js of course. The Node.js package ecosystem, npm, is the largest ever, with over 400,000 ... Continue Reading

SyncPerf: Categorizing, detecting, and diagnosing synchronization performance bugs

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments
SyncPerf: Categorizing, detecting, and diagnosing synchronization performance bugs Mejbah ul Alam et al., EuroSys'17 This paper is an investigation into the causes of synchronisation-related performance issues in concurrent systems, together with a pair of tools that can help to detect and diagnose them. The main SyncPerf detection tool is very lightweight (average overhead 2.3%). It ... Continue Reading

SGXBounds: memory safety for shielded execution

~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments
SGXBounds: memory safety for shielded execution Kuvaiskii et al., EuroSys'17 We've previously looked at a number of Intel SGX-related papers in The Morning Paper, including SCONE, which today's paper builds on. SGX comes with a memory encryption engine and seeks to protect trusted applications from an untrusted operating system, providing confidentiality and integrity guarantees. SGX, ... Continue Reading