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Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally ver... by pjc50 on Thursday March 04, 2021 @02:40PM (#26347141)
1) nobody cares

2) it's a pretty rare skillet with specialist tooling, that doesn't really provide the itch scratch of most open source

3) "correctly formulating the problem in a formal specification" is really hard, given the inability of most stack overflow posters to formulate questions rigorously

4) for almost all projects, we value mutability over eternity

Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally ver... by shoo on Friday March 05, 2021 @07:04AM (#26355893)
another angle is the business perspective.

a lot of software is deployed in the service of the goals of business. To serve that purpose it often isn't necessary for the software to be completely correct. If it is probably sort of correct that's often good enough. Better to have something sort of correct deployed and running next week than something that costs more money and time to build, is a lot harder to hire people to maintain, relies on a formal analysis that is highly sensitive to changes in assumptions, and achieves a level of correctness that is unnecessary for the situation.

from this perspective, investing effort into formal methods will often give a poor return on investment compared to alternatives of hacking things together & running a few tests to catch obvious defects.

In some situations it seems to be worth investing in formal methods. Eg relatively well defined systems with very high costs if they fail.

Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally ver... by cloogshicer on Thursday March 04, 2021 @02:52PM (#26347288)
Hmm, I think at least people on HN care. I think most developers care. Did you see the recent post about the slow loading times in GTA 5?

Problems like that would go away with something like this, no? (if it is possible and there isn't a fault in my argument)

Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally ver... by nawgz on Thursday March 04, 2021 @03:07PM (#26347498)
> Did you see the recent post about the slow loading times in GTA 5?

Did you? It seems pretty obvious to me that Rockstar knew that this was slow as hell, and they were showing ads during that time window. Business interests are not software engineering interests, so I don't think problems like that would go away with something like this, no.

Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally ver... by cloogshicer on Thursday March 04, 2021 @03:20PM (#26347693)
I don't know, a lot of people in that thread argued that this must've actually cost Rockstar a lot of money. I'm not sure which side of the argument is true, both sound plausible to me.
Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally ver... by Aeronwen on Thursday March 04, 2021 @05:56PM (#26349694)
The people who can't be bothered to play now, will demand R* do something about the cheaters and people who bought their way to the top already. The people they gained won't stay, because R* won't ditch the people who actually make them money.

So all this will really do is put more load on their servers, now that the bottleneck moved off of your hardware and back onto thiers.

Re:Ask HN: Why aren't we building a database of formally ver... by plorkyeran on Thursday March 04, 2021 @09:55PM (#26351972)
No, formal verification would not help with code being accidentally quadratic due to a standard library function doing something different from what the author thought it did. The lack of a formally verified json parser is also almost certainly not why the author of the code chose to roll their own parser rather than using one the of many pre-existing libraries.