The focus of Whisper is on how to develop (new) and improve
(existing) infrastructure software.  Infrastructure software (also
called systems software) is the software that underlies all
computing. Such software allows applications to access resources and
provides essential services such as memory management, synchronization
and inter-process interactions. Starting bottom-up from the hardware,
examples include virtual machine hypervisors, operating systems,
managed runtime environments, standard libraries, and browsers, which
amount to the new operating system layer for Internet applications.
For such software, efficiency and correctness are fundamental. Any
overhead will impact the performance of all supported
applications. Any failure will prevent the supported applications from
running correctly. Since computing now pervades our society, with few
paper backup solutions, correctness of software at all levels is
critical.  Formal methods are increasingly being applied to operating
systems code in the research
community.
Still, such efforts require a huge amount of manpower and a high
degree of expertise which makes this work difficult to replicate
in standard infrastructure-software development.

In terms of methodology, Whisper is at the interface of the domains of
operating systems, software engineering and programming languages.  Our
approach is to combine the study of problems in the development of
real-world infrastructure software with concepts in programming language
design and implementation, e.g., of domain-specific languages, and
knowledge of low-level system behavior. A focus of our work is on
providing support for legacy code, while taking the needs and competences
of ordinary system developers into account.

We aim at providing solutions that can be easily learned and adopted by
system developers in the short term. Such solutions can be tools, such as
Coccinelle
for transforming C programs, or
domain-specific languages such as Devil and
Bossa for designing drivers and kernel
schedulers. Due to the small size of the team, Whisper will mainly target
operating system kernels and runtimes for programming languages.  We will
put an emphasis on achieving measurable improvements in performance and
safety in practice, and on feeding these improvements back to the
infrastructure software developer community.