Escaping Infinite Loops 204
twocentplain writes in with an MIT news release about Jolt, a research project designed to unfreeze software stuck in an infinite loop (for a subset of infinite loops). It uses a combination of static instrumentation (using LLVM) and a run time watchdog that checks the program state during loop iteration; when a duplicate state is detected it permits the user to take one a few actions to escape the loop. The authors claim it works well enough that the program can often continue operating properly. The original paper contains detailed case studies.
Re:Another advanced techiique to escape invinite l (Score:2, Informative)
Listen to your management. Generally: failing silently is worse than failing noisily (is worse than not failing at all of course).
In any case, your technique—unless you do a lot more analysis of your software than your comment suggests—will lead to a) lots of watchdog code cluttering up the logic and b) the software failing when it’s run on more data than you expected.