Space for customised code

An academic at Southampton University has been awarded £300,000 to improve the safety and usability of automatically generated software codes used in space and automotive industries.

Dr Bernd Fischer at the university's School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) has received funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The award will help to develop systematic techniques and supporting tools to allow application developers to customise automatically generated code.

According to Dr Fischer, software developers generally rely on code generation to translate high-level models into code. This can speed up development and increase productivity and reliability but the output code can differ from the user's exact requirements.

Over a three-year period, Dr Fischer proposes to develop a domain-specific code generator with the capacity to support reliable code customisation.

He said: ‘This research is about making changes to the output of code generators. It's about making the code generator more flexible without having to go into the inner guts of the machine.’