Anticrasher: Predicting and preventing impending crashes on runtime at user end

摘要

Software coding is becoming more complex with the development of fast, complicated hardware structure as well as compatible, highly functional software itself. Increase in source lines of code definitely results in increasing bugs in some sense. Despite much efforts have been expended on testing and debugging, none of the software can be guaranteed as 100% bug free. As a result, the existing bugs sometimes result in application and possible OS crashes. From a research point of view, these bugs may be addressed by debugging tools. However, for a normal user, it is yet another irritating experience, sometimes even causing unsaved data and hours of efforts to be lost. End users have no other option than using the buggy software or avoiding bugs until patched by some updates. This proposal is the first, to the best of our knowledge, to introduce an anticrasher tool, which prevents buggy applications from crashing without accessing source code at user end. Our tool pauses the execution that leads applications to crash at user end and notifies end users about the future crash, which helps them to save the file, re-execute or restart the application.