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July 10, 2015 02:00 pm

Computer Program Fixes Old Code Faster Than Expert Engineers

An anonymous reader writes: Less than two weeks after one group of MIT researchers unveiled a system capable of repairing software bugs automatically, a different group has demonstrated another system called Helium, which "revamps and fine-tunes code without ever needing the original source, in a matter of hours or even minutes." The process works like this: "The team started with a simple building block of programming that's nevertheless extremely difficult to analyze: binary code that has been stripped of debug symbols, which represents the only piece of code that is available for proprietary software such as Photoshop. ... With Helium, the researchers are able to lift these kernels from a stripped binary and restructure them as high-level representations that are readable in Halide, a CSAIL-designed programming language geared towards image-processing. ... From there, the Helium system then replaces the original bit-rotted components with the re-optimized ones. The net result: Helium can improve the performance of certain Photoshop filters by 75 percent, and the performance of less optimized programs such as Microsoft Windows' IrfanView by 400 to 500 percent." Their full academic paper (PDF) is available online.

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