Comment by nasretdinov
5 hours ago
The code needs to be not in the state of "no obvious bugs", but "obviously no bugs". Especially the programming language runtime. Otherwise there is no hope you can sustain any development whatsoever
5 hours ago
The code needs to be not in the state of "no obvious bugs", but "obviously no bugs". Especially the programming language runtime. Otherwise there is no hope you can sustain any development whatsoever
No language runtime is ever in a state of "obviously no bugs".
Good luck demanding that of anything of JSC's or LLVM's complexity
On one hand, sure, the entire point of a programming language is to make complex ideas able to be expressed in simpler abstractions. On the other hand, we can damn well try.
Yes. People are losing the plot and embracing corruption with logic like this:
There will always be a few employees stealing. So why don't we just use this system that consistently and randomly introduces theft into every level of our cashflow. We can't expect perfection!
Damn well trying to enforce an "obviously no bugs" rule in a language runtime would mean zero progress in language runtimes.
We certainly wouldn't have gotten to where we are with runtime and compiler quality and performance if we had damn well tried to enforce such a rule
6 replies →
My Elm code base was virtually bug free. My current python code base is riddled with small bugs. Some designs makes it easy to trust your code. Some make it die by a thousand paper cuts.
Big llm rewrites I fear lead to the latter.
how similar is your elm app to a JIT compiler runtime?
Perhaps then it would be better to not use tools of this level of complexity.
I think LLVM is a perfect example of what happens when it's too complicated: it's slow, it's bug-ridden when you stray away from the beaten path (e.g. Rust hits bugs in LLVM like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/l4roqk/a_fix_for_the_... ), and it's really hard to use and understand.
It's obviously not useless because of that, but it's a great example of what happens when you cannot fully control the implementation complexity
So don't use compilers at all?
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how would you suggest we compile literally anything?
Won’t happen unless the thing is implemented in lean4.
Proving something is correct doesn't automatically make it obvious though. For it to be obvious it needs to either be intuitive or it needs to be (reasonably) simple