Comment by mkjs
21 hours ago
It's way more complicated than that. Bear in mind many of the network protocols in use today are decades old and have been constantly evolving, but there has generally been a consideration to maintain interoperability.
Then consider that not all vendors implement the standards identically, because the standards can be a bit woolly and in some cases followed rather than lead live implementations.
There will be a bunch of code that looks useless, but is actually there because of specific interoperability scenarios.
That's a good point.
I wonder whether AI is any good at looking at that code,running the system, and documenting those edge cases?
I'm probably not describing the scale of the issue adequately. Lots of these bugs only show up when you have a specific bit of hardware on a specific version of code, and it's connected to another specific bit of hardware running another specific version of code.
Lots of this stuff should work in theory, you only find out that it doesn't in practice when you try it on real hardware. And there are thousands of bits of hardware.
It's good, but it can't create information that is undiscoverable.
Indeed. Making a perfect clone of such software is I suspect provably impossible because you have no way to assemble all the test cases. There might be some peer box out in the wild somewhere that is the only thing that will exercise some code path. You have no idea what that box is or what it does.