Communications of the ACM
Latest Research
From Communications of the ACM
X86-TSO: A Rigorous and Usable Programmer's Model For X86 Multiprocessors
Exploiting the multiprocessors that have recently become ubiquitous requires high-performance and reliable concurrent systems code. However, concurrent programming...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Solid Foundation For X86 Shared Memory
Multithreaded programs that communicate through shared memory are pervasive. Today they are the most obvious...
From Communications of the ACM
seL4: Formal Verification of an Operating-System Kernel
We report on the formal, machine-checked verification of the seL4 microkernel from an abstract specification down to its C implementation. We assume correctness...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Learning To Do Program Verification
When you decide to use a piece of software, how do you know it will do what you need it to do? Will it be safe to run? Will it interfere...
From Communications of the ACM
Asserting and Checking Determinism For Multithreaded Programs
The trend towards processors with more and more parallel cores is increasing the need for software that can take advantage of...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Building Confidence in Multicore Software
Surprises may be fun in real life, but not so in software. One approach to avoiding surprises in software is to establish its...
From Communications of the ACM
Automatic Program Repair With Evolutionary Computation
There are many methods for detecting and mitigating software errors but few generic methods for automatically repairing errors once they are discovered. Recent...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Automated Patching Techniques: The Fix Is In
Finding bugs is technically demanding and yet economically vital. How much more difficult yet valuable would it be to...
From Communications of the ACM
Native Client: A Sandbox For Portable, -Untrusted X86 Native Code
Native Client is a sandbox for untrusted x86 native code. It aims to give browser-based applications the computational performance of native applications without...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Native Client: A Clever Alternative
Google's Native Client is an intriguing new system that allows untrusted x86 binaries to run safely on bare metal.
From Communications of the ACM
Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion
We all receive spam advertisements, but few of us have encountered a person who admits to following through on an offer and making a purchase. And yet, the relentlessness...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: They Do Click, Don't They?
You never click on advertisements received in spam or in phishing messages, do you? Nobody does. So, if that is...
From Communications of the ACM
Optimistic Parallelism Requires Abstractions
Writing software for multicore processors is greatly simplified if we could automatically parallelize sequential programs. Although auto-parallelization has been...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Abstraction For Parallelism
Looking for some new insight into an old problem? The familiar problem of writing parallel applications and a...
From Communications of the ACM
Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality?: An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista
Existing literature on distributed development in software engineering and other fields discusses various challenges,...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Maintaining Quality in the Face of Distributed Development
It was a problem that should not have taken three weeks to solve. The documentation claimed that if a function was called...
From Communications of the ACM
Formal Verification of a Realistic Compiler
This paper reports on the development and formal verification of CompCert, a compiler from Clight (a large subset of the C programming language) to PowerPC assembly...
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: A Compiler's Story
In the early 1970s, pioneers like Floyd, Dijkstra, and Hoare argued that programs should be formally specified and proven...
From Communications of the ACM
Securing Frame Communication in Browsers
Many Web sites embed third-party content in frames, relying on the browser's security policy to protect against malicious content. However, frames provide insufficient...
From Communications of the ACM