CAREER: Language Features for Robust Software

开发可靠的软件系统是我们社会面临的一个关键挑战。尽管经过多年的努力，软件系统仍然遭受灾难性的故障。通常，软件故障是由系统关键组件的错误传播引起的。不幸的是，当前的软件开发工具和实践实际上鼓励引入不必要的依赖关系，这些依赖关系会在概念上不相关的组件之间传播错误。这项研究的目标是探索一种新的方法来创建对故障具有健壮性的软件系统。该方法将软件系统的高层结构暴露给编译器和运行时环境，以启用适当管理错误传播的技术的自动应用，从而使软件系统更具弹性。这种方法的基础是一种规范语言，它允许开发人员识别任务，并描述何时应该调用任务，以及每个任务如何改变对象的概念状态。一组技术使用这些信息来监视和分析任务执行，以消除不必要的依赖关系。这项研究的更广泛的影响是潜在的减轻软件故障的影响。

Developing reliable software systems is a key challenge for oursociety. Despite many years of effort, software systems still sufferfrom catastrophic failures. All too often, software failures arecaused by the propagation of errors through critical components of thesystem. Unfortunately, current software development tools andpractices actually encourage the introduction of unnecessarydependencies that serve to propagate errors between conceptuallyunrelated components.The goal of this research is to explore a new approach for creatingsoftware systems that are robust against failures. The approachexposes the high-level structure of a software system to the compilerand run-time environment to enable the automatic application of techniques thatappropriately manage error propagation to make software systems moreresilient. The foundation of this approach is a specificationlanguage that allows the developer to identify tasks and describe whentasks should be invoked and how each task changes the conceptualstates of objects. A set of techniques use this information tomonitor and analyze task execution to eliminate unnecessarydependencies. The broader impact of this research is the potential tomitigate the effects of software faults.