[PRL] FW: [Csail-related] Course Announcement: Patrick Cousot - 16.399Abstract Interpretation

[Philippe Meunier]

Mitchell Wand wrote:
>Aero & Astro???

Cousot and people around him have been working for a while on a static
C analyzer specialized for the kind of C code that's part of Airbus'
huge flight software.  From what I've heard Airbus is happy with it.

Little story: the people at NASA I was working with over the Fall told
me that some time ago they offered Airbus to analyze their code using
the C analyzer that the NASA people had developped for their Mars
Explorer project.  The idea was to compare the analyzer developped by
Cousot with the analyzer developped by the people at NASA (one of them
being a former student of Cousot) by analyzing one big real-life piece
of software.  Turns out Airbus refused the offer because apparently
they didn't trust NASA very much to not leak their code to other
people (what with NASA being very close to Boeing, etc...)  The NASA
people then offered Airbus to give a copy of their analyzer to Cousot
and just let him run it on the Airbus code he's already analyzing with
his own analyzer.  Then he would just give the overall performance
results back to NASA without any further details.  Airbus still
refused on the ground that even just knowning how much time it took to
analyze their software would give some indication to NASA (and hence
in their mind to Boeing) about how big and how complex their flight
software is...

Philippe