Anarchy Labs reposted this
The linux kernel is 28 million lines of code. These are 28 million opportunities for attack. In possibly one of the most widely depended on projects in the world. Humans alone can't possibly defend this. Humans need to find every vulnerability. An attacker only needs to find one. The future must automate defending it. A few months ago I spoke with Prof. Justin Cappos at NYU Tandon School of Engineering about automating code quality. His answers surprised me. I've personally always hated linters. I'm very scientific. Linters seemed arbitrary. Rules made up by pedants. Justin's lab had an idea: Maybe we could measure the importance of these rules scientifically. We can actually figure out if a line of code is statistically confusing. Why is confusing code a bigger problem than not enough whitespace? Simple: It's harder to debug what you can't understand. Using these techniques they found 3.6 million confusing lines of code in open repositories. Hopefully these techniques lead to a safer kernel. Try them for yourself and check out our latest accelerometer podcast! https://lnkd.in/exnQuN7Q