FUNDING FOR NEW SOFTWARE PARADIGM
(Washington, DC, press release by IP Newswire, 1 April 1998)
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
today announced a major new
initiative in software engineering. F.P. Rivers, program manager for the
initiative, said that it addresses a major problem facing the US military:
that much of current information technology is too "compute-intensive" to be
deployed where it is most needed -- at the small unit or even individual
soldier level.
This initiative has its origins in a fortuitous observation: Rivers and
several colleagues noticed that users on the most widely used platform --
Windows 95 -- were routinely presented with messages that an unknown
unrecoverable error had occurred, and that these users just as routinely
ignored those messages. "This occurred not just in casual use, but also in
mission-critical operations."
Rivers said "Once we started thinking about these messages not as a help,
but as a hindrance, several other observations came together." In a typical
program, 40% to 80% of the code is devoted to error detection and error
handling. "Software bloat" -- the ever increasing size of programs -- has
been blamed on programmers adding more and more features, but could also be
blamed on all the error handling associated with those features. To make
matters worse, multiple studies had shown that much, if not most, of the
error-handling code was never tested. Sometimes this was because of time
and budget pressures; sometimes the potential errors were so obscure and
complex that the situations were too difficult to create "in the lab". This
research was backed up by actual experience: error-handling code was often
found to have significant errors.
Rivers summarized "So, the typical program is overloaded with code that is
rarely used, that may not work, and whose output is likely to be ignored
anyway." He concluded "With this code removed, programs will be
dramatically smaller and will run somewhat-to-noticeably faster."
Many software developers, including several major vendors, have already
taken some tentative steps in this direction, having recognized pieces of
the problem, but without grasping the "big picture". Rivers said he expects
this new approach, dubbed "Fault-Oblivious Computing", to quickly become the
dominant software-engineering paradigm. He acknowledged that there were
small highly specialized segments where fault-tolerant computing and
program verification would still be of value. A major component of this
initiative will be to develop tools to automatically identify and remove
unneeded error-handling code from existing applications.
The success of this approach would be bad news for memory-chip
manufacturers, who are already hard-hit by decreased demand.
Version Info: $Revision: 1.2 $ $Date: 2002/03/10 07:59:22 $
Copyright 1998 by Douglas B. Moran
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