Beetles vs. Humanity: We Need Reinforcements

Konstantin Serebryany, Google developer Google

programs run on many millions of computers: from powerful multiprocessor servers to handheld devices with Android OS. And these programs are written by people who, as you know, tend to make mistakes. A small team from the Moscow office of Google is struggling with these errors.

We are not trying to look for errors manually - it is as hopeless as catching fleas with your hands on a mammoth. Instead, we make “flea traps”: they chase “races”, remember everything about memory errors, plug leaks and lock deadlocks. The legs of flea traps are from binary translation, the hands are from compilation and optimization, the body is from state machines and graph theory, and the head is from common sense (without artificial intelligence and a couple of regular expressions, it also did).

Our tools have already found thousands of errors in various Google programs, including the Chrome browser. For a final and irrevocable victory over flea bugs we need helpers. If you are not afraid of the words “assembler”, “compiler” and “multithreading”, send us your resume!