Well, one of the best research in compilers and languages, IMHO is applying static analysis and constraint solvers to practical systems (e.g. C) find bugs and/o

Well, one of the best research in compilers and languages, IMHO is applying static analysis and constraint solvers to practical systems (e.g. C) find bugs and/or automatically generate tests to find bugs: http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/ http://www.stanford.edu/~engler/ Coverity is a startup from such research. The new Klee paper is a good read as well.