Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking

April 17, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

Teaching rigorous distributed systems with efficient model checking Michael et al., EuroSys'19 On the surface you might think today’s paper selection an odd pick. It describes the labs environment, DSLabs, developed at the University of Washington to accompany a course in distributed systems. During the ten week course, students implement four different assignments: an exactly-once ... Continue Reading

Fixed it for you: protocol repair using lineage graphs

February 1, 2019May 25, 2020 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Fixed it for you: protocol repair using lineage graphs Oldenburg et al., CIDR'19 This is a cool paper on a number of levels. Firstly, the main result that catches my eye is that it’s possible to build a distributed systems ‘debugger’ that can suggest protocol-level fixes. E.g. say you have a system that sometimes sends ... Continue Reading

BLeak: automatically debugging memory leaks in web applications

August 7, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

BLeak: Automatically debugging memory leaks in web applications Vilk & Berger, PLDI'18 BLeak is a Browser Leak debugger that finds memory leaks in web applications. You can use BLeak to test your own applications by following the instructions at http://bleak-detector.org. Guided by BLeak, we identify and fix over 50 memory leaks in popular libraries and ... Continue Reading

Debugging data flows in reactive programs

June 29, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments

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

How not to structure your database-backed web applications: a study of performance bugs in the wild

June 28, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 27 Comments

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

Deep code search

June 26, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments

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

To distribute or not to distribute? Why licensing bugs matter

June 25, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

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

Automated localization for unreproducible builds

June 22, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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

Generalized data structure synthesis

June 21, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments

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

ConflictJS: finding and understanding conflicts between JavaScript libraries

June 20, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

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

the morning paper

a random walk through Computer Science research, by Adrian Colyer

Software Engineering