We’re pleased to announce that Facebook engineer Peter O’Hearn has been elected as a Fellow of the UK Royal Academy of Engineering for his pioneering work on separation logic, a novel computer science theory that underpins Facebook’s open source static analysis tool Infer.
At Facebook, Infer catches more than 1,000 bugs per month before code is shipped to people’s phones, saving engineers hours of manual review and testing and ensuring a good experience for people who use our family of apps. Separation logic allows Infer to model a program’s behavior and reason about small, independent parts of the application. It also scales to large, real-world code bases. Since it was open-sourced last year, Infer has been forked more than 700 times and is used by companies such as Uber and Spotify.
Peter is one of 50 engineers newly elected as Academy Fellows. You can read the full announcement here.