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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.
Re:Compilers are hard by dkarl on Thursday January 21, 2021 @10:44AM (#25860037)
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.
Re:Compilers are hard by mook on Thursday January 21, 2021 @12:30PM (#25861485)
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.
Re:Compilers are hard by 0xTJ on Friday January 22, 2021 @10:12PM (#25879222)
Of course not. Correctness doesn't mean that everything has to be perfect. It means that things work as defined. A C program should operate as specified.