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Comment by cperciva | Hacker News Reader

Virtualization. Capabilities. Kernel-bypass networking. Static code analysis. Verified-pointer microarchitectures. Coverage-guided fuzzing.

Systems software research has come a long way since 2000.

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Virtualization: See VMS (1977) Kernel-bypass networking: See microkernels (1967) Need I go on?

I think it is a wild misunderstanding of how academic research works to say that the first demonstration of a concept is equal to all further work on a concept. It is like saying that the Human Genome Project isn't recent work because the structure of DNA was discovered in 1953.

"arithmetic has existed for quite a while...what's the novelty Of Mr. Newton's integral? Mathematics research is irrelevant."

This is very common thinking - people seem to equate the first discussion of a concept with "discovery" with "the important stuff".

If that line of thought were consistent, it would credit Babbage, or maybe Turing, as the last computer scientist to do something useful.

I would say there is a difference between development that significantly change the way we look at things and adapting known principals to changing demands.. Where exactly that boundary lays is, I admit, murky at best.

And machine learning is still stuck in the sixties...

It's stuck in the 1760s with the publication of Bayes Theorem.

Yes, please do demonstrate an ancient source of coverage-guided fuzzing, I would be very interested in that.

I think you could make a point that it would be a practical implementation of the "Infinite Monkey Theorem" made practical by extension of Moore's law.. I think the original author expresses disappointment in the lack of fundamental new developments in system research and he has a point. Then again the wheel hasn't changed much in recent history either..

I suspect you're not very familiar with modern fuzzing research because improvements in this area are definitely not simply a manifestation of Moore's law. Many clever and rather fundamental advancements have been invented and implemented here; for instance, the combination of symbolic execution with concrete execution known as concolic testing.

VMS? See IBM System/360 in 1967.

Virtualization and static code analysis existed before 2000.

Granted - the tooling improved.

Sure. And that's what most research is: Take an existing idea and make it better.

Or a known phenomenon and explaining it.

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