ATOM, developed by Srivastava while he was working for Western Research Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., is an example of this kind of new approach. It provides the reusable infrastructure needed to manipulate the binary code that computers run on. When he or she was done, you'd have a tool that could do one thing. More tools like ATOM are needed to help speed up and improve software development, researchers say. Even if it gets twice as fast, it won't solve the real computing problems.
Software is too big, takes a long time to create and requires a huge number of people to create it.
Infrastructure takes months or even years to create. Most universities and software companies don't have the money or time to invest, researchers say. Whenever you are building an infrastructure, there is no immediate tangible result. Larger companies such as Microsoft have the resources to invest in infrastructure, but resources aren't all that's needed. Computing is changing.