Best Disruptive Paper award at ISSRE 2022 for University of Groningen SE researchers

15-Dec-2022

Software engineering researchers Gunnar Kudrjavets and Dr. Ayushi Rastogi from University of Groningen recently won the “Best Disruptive Paper” award at ISSRE 2022. ISSRE is the world’s leading conference in the field of software reliability engineering.

The paper titled “When malloc() Never Returns NULL-Reliability as an Illusion” is a result of a collaboration with industry. The paper’s main conclusion is that attempting to react to out-of-memory errors in modern operating systems such as Android, macOS, and Linux is ineffective. Applications will never be able to handle out-of-memory errors because an operating system will terminate them before an out-of-memory condition occurs. That fact has significant implications for the design and implementation of reliable software.

The authors’ research into memory management builds on empirical findings from Meta (formerly known as Facebook) and Snap. This year Dr. Rastogi’s team has published several other papers on memory management and custom memory allocators.