Comment by jen20

6 days ago

It is straightfoward to build systems which derive their state from the audit trail instead of building the audit trail in parallel. That is what event sourcing is.

TIL, thanks!

I was attempting to emphasize the absurdity of any software system being “absolutely correct at all times”. I don’t believe such a system can exist, at least not in such strong terms.

  • What's important is that the audit trail can be replayed to derive the state of the system - and preferably in such a way that investigators can determine what _would_ have been seen by someone using it on a specific day at a specific time. Whether the system is free from bugs is a different matter - no system is, which is why deriving state from the audit trail instead of a parallel process which is guaranteed to diverge is so important!