A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a way to use 'donor' programs to improve the functionality and reduce system errors and flaws in open-source programs.
Outlined in a paper dubbed "Automatic error elimination by horizontal code transfer across multiple applications," MIT researchers describe the Code Phage system, which automatically transfers code from donor programs to other applications which have buggy code and errors.
During testing, the MIT team -- Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos, Eric Lahtinen, Fan Long and Martin Rinard -- used seven donor applications to eradicate a total of ten errors in open-source recipient programs.
