Computer scientists at University College London have developed a tool that automatically isolates and extracts code from one program and “transplants” it into another. The tool, known as MuScalpel, has the potential to, “ultimately change the understanding of the word ‘programmer’ considerably,” as UCL systems engineer Mark Harman told Wired UK recently. It does so by offering a way around perhaps the most tedious aspect of software engineering, which is re-implementing solutions to problems that have already been solved by other programmers in other programs—“recreating the wheel,” in Harman’s words.
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http://crest.cs.ucl.ac.uk/autotransplantation/MuScalpel.html
I am surprised know one is interested in this here.
I’m frankly not entirely sure what’s so revolutionizing here. Linux for one is built on the philosophy “Do one one thing, but do it right”, which seems much more sensible than bloating code with pre-existing chunks from other sources. That’s where libraries come in, at least in good programming techniques. In short, this project goes counter to any practicable approach. You’ll just end up with the same code snippets duplicated over and over in a bunch of programs. Ba-aad practice.
Furthermore, VLC is such a terrible example to use, since its very core is not to rely on external codecs aso., so it’s far from any typical application in that sense.