Four Short Links: 16 October 2020
Automerge, Alan Turing, Synthetic Biology, and Hangfix
- Automerge — (Github) Data structure library for Javascript (and Rust) providing Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). Automerge is designed for creating local-first software, i.e. software that treats a user’s local copy of their data (on their own device) as primary, rather than centralising data in a cloud service.
- Alan Turing — (BBC) An excellent episode of “In Our Time” radio show, available as a podcast: three academics (including Turing’s biographer) discuss Turing’s life and work. For a popular audience but still interesting.
- The Second Decade of Synthetic Biology — (Nature) Featuring an interesting timeline of advances in the field, from synthetic genomes to CRISPR via self-organizing multicellular structures and CAD for e.coli logic gates.
- Hangfix — In this paper, we present HangFix, a software hang bug fixing framework which can automatically fix a hang bug that is triggered and detected in production cloud environments. HangFix first leverages stack trace analysis to localize the hang function and then performs root cause pattern matching to classify hang bugs into different types based on likely root causes. Next, HangFix generates effective code patches based on the identified root cause patterns. We have implemented a prototype of HangFix and evaluated the system on 42 real-world software hang bugs in 10 commonly used cloud server applications. Our results show that HangFix can successfully fix 40 out of 42 hang bugs in seconds. Check out one coauthor’s other papers for more like this. (via NCSU)
