Detecting Bugs in Code with Intel’s New Machine Programming Tool
Intel unveiled new technology this week to help developers detect bugs in their code more quickly and easily than ever before. This new tool, Intel’s Quantify Real-Time Profiler, will be available this fall with the upcoming release of the Intel® Xeon Phi TM processor code name Knights Landing (code name: KNL). This tool will enable developers to see how well parallel code is actually running in the first place, instead of waiting until after it has been completed to find out if something went wrong.
Why do program errors happen
Program errors happen because there are so many possibilities of what can happen within an application, and programming languages, often do not include human-readable messages to indicate why something went wrong. These bugs usually only affect one user, but when critical application code is compromised, a whole system could be at risk. To get an idea of how often these bugs appear, studies have shown that they occur roughly six out of every 10 million lines of code written. Because these bugs do not necessarily affect the entire system when they’re introduced, programmers need a way to quickly fix them before too much damage has been done.
Intel’s new tool
Intel has unveiled a new tool for identifying bugs and security flaw in a program’s code.
The company showcased the new tool at its annual Developer Forum.
Dubbed Intel Inspector XE, the programming software can detect hundreds of different types of programming mistakes that may exist within code.
A team from the San Francisco Bay Area, California-based security startup illumio is currently using Intel Inspector XE to search for bugs and weaknesses on high-profile computing networks.
It helps us be more efficient, too, because when we find something that could compromise our application, we want to find it quickly, said Bradley Marjoribanks, Vice President of Security Engineering at Illumio.
How it works
The AI-assisted bug-detecting system, Codisplays a software’s traffic light system to communicate the level of risk that a given piece of code is presenting. Specifically, the system uses machine learning to automatically highlight areas of a code that may contain bugs and indicate the severity. One of Codis’s greatest strengths is its ability to maintain specificity while simultaneously sifting through vast amounts of information to identify potential issues within a short period of time. In other words, it’s not just finding any old bug but one with serious implications for business. With this new tool by their side, developers can focus on fixing critical mistakes rather than sorting through piles of false positives – making use more effective than ever before.
Applications of the technology
- Preventable bugs can be found before ever reaching the market, saving consumers time and money.
- Devices containing the technology might be able to download and execute updates automatically, potentially avoiding a knee-jerk reaction to a serious security flaw after something becomes public knowledge.
- Training data can now be compiled automatically, allowing AI agents to learn to avoid specific types of bugs or code problems while they’re still relatively new and unknown.
- Developers who work on one project could benefit from being able to share this machine programming tool across different projects as needed, helping remove redundancies in development cycles that may otherwise seem inefficient due to human error – or just plain bad luck!
Challenges ahead
Intel has always been one of the leaders in programming, but its competitors have developed software that can actually fix the bugs. As time progresses and technology becomes more advanced, it will become increasingly important for companies to be able to identify when a bug is within their system so they can correct it quickly. By developing new programming tools, would make the process easier and allow programmers to be more confident when implementing updates.
