Last week I attended the second Workshop on Software Correctness and Reliability organized by Peter Müller and Martin Vechev here at ETH. As in the first edition one year ago, the workshop featured an impressive collection of speakers who talked about diverse topics in verification. Videos of the talks will be publicly available, so there’s no need to write detailed summaries. Instead, I give my telegraphic impressions of each talk in the form of one-liners. If I used Twitter these could’ve been live tweets; except that I, like Machete, don’t tweet 🙂 (not at the moment anyway). As the name suggests, the impressions do not necessarily talk about the main intended message of each talk; but at least they’re short: if anything tickles your fancy go and watch the videos!

James Larus

Improving the software development culture is not the job of academics; their job is solving technical problems.

Martin Rinard

Just because it passes all tests, it doesn’t mean the program is correct.

David Basin

Security is a form of enforceable safety.

Rajeev Alur

Regular functions or: the power of automata with strings.

Armando Solar-Lezama

Synthesis to improve the code of programmers who use loops where they could use SQL.

Anders Møller

Static analysis to check the code of programmers who use jQuery where they could use loops.

Martin Vechev

Machine learning to guess the meaning of minified (or otherwise obscure) programs.

Peter Müller

Teenage mobile app developers benefit from abstract interpretation.

Vijay Saraswat

Failing asynchronously is OK, as long as someone cleans up.

Ranjit Jhala

Piggybacking type systems to prove properties of (post-)functional languages.
(Rustan Leino featured in absentia as the one who knows what to do with universal quantifiers — the “SMT whisperer”.)

Ahmed Bouajjani

Checking linearizability may be hard, but checking trace inclusion need not be.

Since I skipped the last session, I cannot offer my impressions of Mayur Naik‘s and Manfred Broy‘s talks. If you were there or have watched the videos, feel free to do so in the comments.