Only 4 more days left to go for [SBFT'24 fuzzing competition](https://sbft24.github.io/tools/fuzzing). Please apply if you have a fuzzer that can beat the world competition!

A great survey about use of large language models in software engineering from Fan et al. here.

If you are a researcher in Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Systems, or AI/ML we would love to have you at University of Sydney! Please apply here, and do please reach out if you have any questions. #USyd

It is a sad state of affairs if one has to beg for a password that satisfies the criteria defined by the system that shall remain nameless :(.

A really interesting paper about comparison between AST based tree walking interpreters and byte code interpreters: Larose, Kaleba, Burchell and Marr  AST vs. Bytecode: Interpreters in the Age of Meta-Compilation at OOPSLA'23. They compared Python and Smalltalk interpreters with tree walking and bytecode based implementation. Their finding is that AST interpreters using meta compilation (RPython and Truffle+Graal) were faster than byte code counterparts even after applying all relevant optimizations possible for bytecodes.

This is a very interesting result because AST tree walkers are much more easier to construct and to teach (personal experience). #SE @seresearchers

An interesting paper on using #LLM for automated code repair from Wei et al. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.00608 #SE

 Here (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.15276.pdf) is an excellent paper by Wu et al. about using LLMs for fault localization. It seems that LLMs are better at fault localization than SBFL techniques Jaccard, Tarantula, Ochiai, OP2, Dstar, MBFL and SmartFL by about 50%.  #LLM #SE

An interesting paper on the usage of #LLM in #SE by Hou et al. -- "Large Language Models for Software Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review" https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10620

LLMs can be transformative in software engineering, and this paper does a good job in reviewing the state-of-the-art.

A surprising (for me) opinion I heard at #usesec23 Usenix Security 2023; You can claim CVEs in your fuzzer paper so long as you found them during your research in developing the concerned fuzzer. In particular, there is no expectation of reproducibility of such CVEs specifically using the fuzzer in the paper. I note that CVEs are still considered a sort of real world touchstone for fuzzers by many reviewers. I wonder what the consensus of the community is about this.