Defibrillator for stalled software
It’s happened to everyone: You’re using a familiar piece of software to do something you’ve done a thousand times before — say, find a particular word in a document — and all of a sudden the program just stops working. You click the cursor and move the mouse, but nothing changes on-screen, and finally you just quit the program, losing whatever work you’d done since the last time you saved.Often, a stalled program has gone into what computer scientists call an infinite loop, where it keeps executing a single block of code over and over. At the 25th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming in Lancaster, England, in July, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) presented a new tool that automatically interrupts infinite loops and moves on to the next line of code in the computer program. In tests, their system restored five different programs to stable...