Communications of the ACM
Code 'transplant" Could Revolutionize Programming
A new software tool purportedly can isolate the code of a feature in one program and incorporate it into another program.
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Researchers at University College London (UCL) have developed MuScalpel, a software tool they say is capable of automatically isolating the code of a feature in one program and "transplanting" it into another program.
Research team leader Mark Harman says that like an organ transplant, a code transplant has a chance of being "rejected" by the new "host." However, because the system is automated, it can retry the transplant, hundreds or thousands of times if necessary, until it gets it right.
To demonstrate the new system, Harman's team used MuScalpel to transplant the H.264 video codec from x264 into VLC media player. The automated system was able to complete the task in 26 hours, whereas VLC's manual addition of the codec took 20 days.
The UCL researchers believe MuScalpel could be used to transplant many different features between programs, including everything from automatic save features and social media integration to video chat and spellcheckers. The tool currently only works on the C programming language, but the researchers say it could be adapted to work with, and even between, other languages.
Harman believes the new tool could revolutionize programming, freeing programmers from much of the drudge work of developing software.
From Wired.co.uk
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