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Reproducibility in Computer Systems Research
These results about reproducibility in CS have been the subject of lively discussion at Facebook and G+ lately. The question is, for 613 papers, can the associated software be located, compiled, and run? In contrast with something I often worry about — producing good software — the bar here is low, since even a system…
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Let’s Work on an LLVM Superoptimizer
A compiler optimization has two basic parts. First, it needs to recognize an optimizable situation in the IR (intermediate representation), such as adjacent increments of the same variable. For the optimization to be maximally effective, the situation recognizer should cast as wide a net as possible. For example, we might broaden the applicability of an…
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Writing Solid Code Weeks 7 and 8
The students continued with their compressor/decompressor development. Coverity continued to find plenty of issues for the students to fix. I’m about to start doing a bit of differential testing of their code, using voting to determine who is correct and who is wrong. I lectured on paranoid programming and on building a fuzzer, for sort…
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Paranoid Programming
A lot of software defects stem from developers who lack a proper sense of paranoia. While paranoia can of course be taken to idiotic extremes, a healthy respect for Murphy’s Law is useful in programming. This post is a list of useful paranoid techniques that I hope to use as the basis for a lecture…
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Writing Solid Code Weeks 5 and 6 — The Plot Thickens
Last week was pretty relaxed, I lectured on doing code reviews — pretty much the standard pitch. This week we spent Tuesday doing a code review, I think it went pretty well. I had chosen a team whose code was strong so that our first code review would be a positive one. Today I announced…
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Assertions Are Pessimistic, Assumptions Are Optimistic
We assert a condition when we believe it to be true in every non-buggy execution of our program, but we want to be notified if this isn’t the case. In contrast, we assume a condition when our belief in its truth is so strong that we don’t care what happens if it is ever false.…
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Scary Compiler Code Motion
I ran across this blog post about reader-writer locks and thought it would be fun to present them to the Advanced Operating Systems class that I’m running this spring. Here’s my version of the code, which needed to be adapted a bit to work with GCC: At first I was suspicious that some sort of…
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Use of Assertions
Assertions are great because they: support better testing, make debugging easier by reducing the distance between the execution of a bug and the manifestation of its effects, serve as executable comments about preconditions and postconditions, can act as a gateway drug to formal methods. Assertions are less than great because they: slow down our code,…
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Writing Solid Code Week 4
This week most of the students in the class (but not everyone, since we ran out of time) presented their arguments about the quality of various UNIX utility programs. This was a bit more interesting than it might otherwise have been since some of the utilities running on our student lab machines are hilariously old…
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Writing Solid Code Week 3
This week we finished up the triangle classifier. Not all students’ implementations pass all test cases, which is totally fine with me as long as people learned some lessons about when not to use floating point (I did). On Tuesday we also chose a smallish UNIX utility for each student to evaluate as if it…