Adobe and MIT have developed new technology to take on software rot. Software rot occurs when developers neglect software for too long, and it becomes out of date, slow or useless compared to modern technology.
“It’s really hard for developers to keep up with the pace of technology evolution in CPUs and GPUs,” said Shoaib Kamil, senior research scientist at Adobe’s Creative Technology Lab, according to the company’s blog.
The new technology, dubbed Project Helium, aims to provide a way for software to automatically update and improve itself as fast as hardware evolves. The goal is to analyze and optimize software without software engineers having to step in.
(Related: The origins of Project Helium)
“We wanted to see if we could solve the problem of bit-rot,” said Sylvain Paris, principal research scientist at Adobe, in the company’s blog. “We wanted to automate the process of keeping software up to date.”
The technology has proven successful when applied to image processing, and Paris believed this type of optimization can eventually be applied to a variety of areas in software development.
“In the future, this kind of software optimization has the potential to perform months of traditional software optimization in just minutes,” he said.
