Re:Compilers are hard
by 0xTJ on Thursday January 21, 2021 @08:19AM
(#25858500)
In my opinion, a program that is wrong is always worse than a slow program that is correct. Full stop, no exceptions.
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Almost every commercially successful product I've worked on has been known to be wrong at every point in its useful life. I've worked on a lot of microservices that had no known bugs for most of their deployed life, but they were simple parts of more complex systems that did have known bugs. The computing world is built top to bottom mostly out of programs that are broken.
If this had not been possible, the industry would have gone the way Dijkstra advocated, with mathematical rigor applied to all programming.
Re:Compilers are hard
by JoeAltmaier on Thursday January 21, 2021 @08:27AM
(#25858559)
Queue pedantic counterexamples.
Anyway, in this day of just-in-time software we're not going in that direction any more.
Re:Compilers are hard
by auggierose on Thursday January 21, 2021 @09:11AM
(#25858946)
What direction is that? The direction of correct software?
Re:Compilers are hard
by JoeAltmaier on Thursday January 21, 2021 @09:43AM
(#25859296)
Right. Mostly-correct and on-time is all we're getting paid for. That's what agile is all about.
Hmm, so no floating point math ever, only use arbitrary precision? As far as I know most 3D games do correct-enough math because it'll be replaced in a couple frames anyway.