Yesterday, Mozilla announced a partnership with game developing company Ubisoft to develop Clever-Commit. It is an artificial intelligence based code assistant developed by Ubisoft La Forge. Ubisoft uses the assistant internally, and with this partnership, Firefox will try to find errors in their code.
About 8,000 edits are made in every Firefox release by numerous developers. Using the assistant to save bugs on them can have a large scale effect in Firefox development. The assistant combines data from the bug tracking system and the codebase. Clever-Commit will analyze the changes in code as various developers commit code to the Firefox codebase. It then looks at the previously committed code to draw comparisons and find out buggy code.
The developer is notified if Clever-Commit thinks that a code commit is not proper. This means that the bug could be fixed before a commit. It can even suggest solutions to the bugs it finds. Firefox uses C++, JavaScript, and Rust; Mozilla plans to use Clever-Commit for all of them to bring faster development.
Clever-Commit is not open-source and there seem to be no immediate plans to make it freely available. But this ability to make inferences from large code bases is not exclusive to Clever-Commit. Microsoft has IntelliCode in Visual Studio which has examined many GitHub repositories for best coding methods etc, IntelliSense can also be used to find bugs in the code similar to Clever-Commit.
Head of French division, Mozilla, Sylvestre Ledru said in a blog post: “With a new release every 6 to 8 weeks, making sure the code we ship is as clean as possible is crucial to the performance people experience with Firefox. The Firefox engineering team will start using Clever-Commit in its code-writing, testing and release process. We will initially use the tool during the code review phase, and if conclusive, at other stages of the code-writing process, in particular during automation. We expect to save hundreds of hours of bug riskiness analysis and detection. Ultimately, the integration of Clever-Commit into the full Firefox developer workflow could help catch up to 3 to 4 out of 5 bugs before they are introduced into the code.”
Clever-Commit was originally displayed by Ubisoft as Commit Assistant last year.
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