Comment by pando85

14 days ago

Memory safety catches buffer overflows. CI catches logic bugs. Neither catches the Unix API gotchas nobody documented.

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pando85

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Arch-TK  14 days ago

They're not API gotchas in most cases.

And writing comprehensive tests for this behaviour is very difficult regardless of which language you are using.

I am all for rust rewrites of things. But in this case, these are mistakes which were encouraged by the lazy design of `std::fs` and the developers' lack of relevant experience.

And to clarify, I don't blame the developers for lacking the relevant experience. Working on such a project is precisely the right place to learn stuff like this.

I think it's an absurdly dumb move by Canonical to take this project and beta-test it on normal users' machines though…

vhantz  14 days ago

How does CI catch logic bugs?

  • bluGill  14 days ago

    That depends on what tests you are running. In any significant projects you need a test suite so large that you wouldn't run all the tests before pushing to CI - instead you are the targeted tests that test the area of code you changed, but there are more "integration tests" that go through you code and thus could break, but you don't actually run.

    You can also run some static analysis that is too long to run locally every time, but once in a while it will point out "this code pattern is legal buy is almost always a bug"

    It is also possible to do some formal analysis of code on CI that you wouldn't always run locally - I'm not an expert on these.

    • vhantz  14 days ago

      That's true in general. In this case where the logic bugs are from not understanding the API being implemented (and in any similar case), tests wouldn't catch the bugs either (even integration tests) because good tests require understanding the contract of the unit being tested.