Electronics

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PLINY: Software Tool Autocompletes & Autocorrects Code for Programmers

A Rice University-led team of software experts is working on creating a sophisticated tool called PLINY that will both 'autocomplete' and 'autocorrect' code for programmers, much like the software that completes search queries and corrects spelling on web browsers and smartphones. Funded by DARPA, PLINY is part of the agency's Mining and Understanding Software Enclaves program - an initiative that seeks to gather hundreds of billions of lines of publicly available open-source computer code and to mine that code to create a searchable database of properties, behaviors, and vulnerabilities. The team members say the effort will represent a significant advance in the way software is created, verified, and debugged. The core of the system will be a data-mining engine that continuously scans the massive repository of open-source code. The engine will leverage the latest techniques in deep program analyses and big-data analytics to populate and refine a database that can be queried whenever a programmer needs help finishing or debugging a piece of code.