Software Engineering

Memory manipulation primitives (memcpy, memset, memcmp) are used by virtually every application, from high performance computing to user interfaces. They often consume a significant portion of CPU cycles. Because they are so ubiquitous and critical, they are provided by language runtimes and in particular by libc, the C standard library. These implementations are heavily optimized, typically...

Today, software engineers need to know not only how to program effectively but also how to develop proper engineering practices to make their codebase sustainable and healthy. This book emphasizes this difference between programming and software engineering. How can software engineers manage a living codebase that evolves and responds to changing requirements and demands over the length of its...

Flaky, non-deterministic tests make culprit finding (or finding the version of code where a test started failing) in large scale repositories difficult. A naive binary search (or bisect) algorithm will be unreliable if the test being used for the bisection is flaky. If retries are conducted for each tested version the process becomes expensive. We propose a flake-aware culprit finding system...

Machine learning has the potential to significantly improve systems, but only under certain conditions. We describe a taxonomy to help identify whether or not machine learning should be applied to particular systems problems, and which approaches are most promising. We believe that this taxonomy can help practitioners and researchers decide how to most effectively use machine learning in their...