Comment by capableweb

5 years ago

> the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve

It bothers me that so many of us developers are annoyed by managers saying stupid stuff like "shouldn't be too hard" about things they don't understand, but then other developers walk into the same trap.

Yes, it looks simple at the surface. It most likely isn't. The problem is not that it looks simple, the problem is that you assume it is simple, probably because you don't have the full context.

The person posted a PoC that works. Surely they have context now?

  • That's very true, and the PoC works for that person. It's not that easy in real-life development though, you can't just switch out the JSON parser and call it a day. Lots of testing has to be done and you have to go through all the previous changes to make sure you're not missing what the previous maintainers did to fix some one-in-a-million issues.

    I'm not saying it's impossible for this to be as easy as the author claims it to be. I'm just saying that it might not actually be that easy in reality, if you're on the inside.

    • Let's say that JSON parser is used in so many other places and we are afraid of regression. Guess what? We can make a new one. Let's call it newImprovedJsonParser(). Use that only at this spot, and you have fixed the issue without breaking other parts. You can then replace the other's once you vet that they are compatible.

    • OK, don't switch out the JSON parser. Just patch in the caching strlen before parsing the json, and set it back to normal strlen after; and fiddle with the hashmap stuff.

I agree "shouldn't be too hard" should be avoided, but in this case the developers should fix it even if it is hard.

  • Back of the envelope (and if the same problem applies to consoles in addition to PC), the fix would save 30+ human waking lifetimes per year.

it _is_ simple, as evident by the article if you read it in full

  • I _did_ read it. Did I miss the part where Rockstar confessed it was a really easy issue to fix and they apologised or what's your point?

    • 'Yes, it looks simple at the surface. It most likely isn't' my point is the issue is simple, as the article proves.