
Courgette: better binary diffing by understanding x86 - soundsop
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/05/courgette.html
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cperciva
This is the approach used by Exediff (B.S. Baker, U. Manber, and R. Muth,
Compressing Differences of Executable Code, ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Compiler
Support for System Software, 1999).

I can't say that I'm very surprised that it's making an appearance in Chrome,
given that one of the authors (Udi Manber) is a VP Engineering at Google.

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litewulf
I believe Udi Manber works in Search or online something or other, and not
Apps.

There are 10,000 engineers (in varying capacities) at Google, who have all
done lots of disparate and random things. Sometimes, by sheer stroke of luck,
people will happen to have already done something, but due to size, it will
simply be reinvented.

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cperciva
I didn't say that Udi Manber was directly involved in this project -- but that
doesn't mean that his presence at Google didn't contribute. Firefox uses
bsdiff, and I know Chrome people have looked at it; it wouldn't surprise me in
the slightest if they saw the name "Udi Manber" in my thesis, said "hey, we've
heard of that guy", and were consequentially encouraged to replicate his
approach (well, his student's approach, technically) to the problem.

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litewulf
Sure, thats reasonable. I think I'm just a bit frustrated by the "so and so
works at Google, therefore they must have chosen technology X or approach Y
because of their presence!" when its very hard to know what everyone in (or
formerly at) Google has ever worked on and remember to call them up.

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spitfire
I did this in the 90's in pascal as shareware. No one bought it.

Cool idea though.

~~~
jws
_I did this in the 90's in pascal as shareware. No one bought it._ – This may
be one of the best lines I heard in weeks. I will use it to dismiss
uninteresting ideas until someone threatens bodily injury upon me.

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samlittlewood
Similar idea gets used for compression of code - transform it to a more
amenable form.

<http://www.paul.sladen.org/projects/compression/>

Make sure that the transform and its inverse are robust in the face of random
data - and it can be completely hidden from the user.

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plaes
Well, it might work with Windows, but it's really a no go on distributions
which are using package management and un-privileged user accounts.

