Debugging data flows in reactive programs Banken et al., ICSE'18 To round off our look at papers from ICSE, here’s a really interesting look at the challenges of debugging reactive applications (with a certain Erik Meijer credited among the authors). ... in recent years the use of Reactive Programming (RP) has exploded. Languages such as … Continue reading Debugging data flows in reactive programs
Tag: Software Engineering
Mostly posts relating to software design and architecture.
How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild
How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild Yang et al., ICSE'18 This is a fascinating study of the problems people get into when using ORMs to handle persistence concerns in their web applications. The authors study real-world applications and distil a catalogue of common performance anti-patterns. … Continue reading How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild
Deep code search
Deep code search Gu et al., ICSE'18 The problem with searching for code is that the query, e.g. "read an object from xml," doesn’t look very much like the source code snippets that are the intended results, e.g.: * That’s why we have Stack Overflow! Stack Overflow can help with ‘how to’ style queries, but … Continue reading Deep code search
To distribute or not to distribute? Why licensing bugs matter
To distribute or not to distribute? Why licensing bugs matter Vendome et al., ICSE'18 Software licensing can quickly get quite complicated, with over 100 known open source licenses out there, and distributions often including components with a mix of licenses. Unsurprisingly, developers find it hard to determine appropriate licenses for their work, and to interpret … Continue reading To distribute or not to distribute? Why licensing bugs matter
Automated localization for unreproducible builds
Automated localization for unreproducible builds Ren et al., ICSE'18 Reproducible builds are an important component of integrity in the software supply chain. Attacks against package repositories and build environments may compromise binaries and produce packages with backdoors (see this report for a recent prominent example of compromised packages on DockerHub). If the same source files … Continue reading Automated localization for unreproducible builds
Generalized data structure synthesis
Generalized data structure synthesis Loncaric et al., ICSE'18 Many systems have a few key data structures at their heart. Finding correct and efficient implementations for these data structures is not always easy. Today’s paper introduces Cozy (https://cozy.uwplse.org), which can handle this task for you given a high-level specification of the state, queries, and update operations … Continue reading Generalized data structure synthesis
ConflictJS: finding and understanding conflicts between JavaScript libraries
ConflictJS: finding and understanding conflicts between JavaScript libraries Patra et al., ICSE'18 The JavaScript ecosystem is fertile ground for dependency hell. With so many libraries being made available and the potential for global namespace clashes, it’s easy for libraries to break each other. Sometimes in an obvious to spot way (that’s a good day!), and … Continue reading ConflictJS: finding and understanding conflicts between JavaScript libraries
