Somehow we still have medicine (they do a lot of testing before they release anything!) and doctors (they have insurance!).

It would increase the barrier to releasing software massively (possibly killing the startup scene altogether), but it doesn't mean software development would end.

If we applied the same rigorous testing and verification processes in medicine to software, software development as we know it would definitely end. It would probably take years to convert a straight-forward requirement into a working piece of software. Something like Teams or VS Code that get new features added all the time would not be possible anymore and would cost tons of money. And while security issues should not be taken lightly, I don't consider leaking my user agent to be as big of a problem as getting permanent damage from low-quality medical care.

> If we applied the same rigorous testing and verification processes in medicine to software, software development as we know it would definitely end.

Good.

>Something like Teams or VS Code that get new features added all the time would not be possible anymore and would cost tons of money. And while security issues should not be taken lightly, I don't consider leaking my user agent to be as big of a problem as getting permanent damage from low-quality medical care.

It won't take years. We will have to train developers and create better tools. Then you will libraries and apps sandboxed, like we would not allow an IDE full access to the internet, or to the entire hard drive without permissions.

Say you get the task to build an RSS reader, you will have to choose:

1 use a language+standard library that is safe and the vendor offers some warranty

2 use an unsafe language or some unsafe libraries but you will have to take the risks and do the work to review and evaluate

3 in case you prefer open source you find a language and ecosystem where there is some foundation that even if it can't offer some warranty it accepts donations and contributions that are directly targeted on security, so you would have packages that would have a checkmark that was reviewed by a team.

So I would use a safe language(a GC one) with a trusted standard library, so now I can do the network requests to grab the XML files , parse them with the secure XML library and render the content in the safe Web View provided.

This means that the guys that give or sell me the XML library and the Web View will take the risk, but they can charge for their work. We would probably get smart developers using some extremely safe languages like math safe not Rust(safer then C safe) and this guys can write a maybe slower but 100% web view (maybe with less shiny animations).

Capitalism would be forced to invest in this safer tools and in training the developers, Microsoft ,Apple, Google will have to secure their unsafe OS and libraries but for sure it would not take 1 guy years to build an RSS reader that would not take over your data and send it to some hacker somewhere.

> Somehow we still have medicine (they do a lot of testing before they release anything!) and doctors (they have insurance!).

The fact that doctors are relatively frequently sued in the US is one of the reasons why US has very expensive healthcare. If you are rich that's fine, but almost everybody else would prefer more available (cheaper) healthcare with doctors who don't need to spend money on liability insurance.

Softeare companies generally take out large (and increasingly expensive) liability insurance policies for exactly this reason.

Parent suggested free software would be the exception to this rule. Personally, i don't understand why it's even legal to publish binary code without the corresponding source, but at least their point made sense: volunteer-run projects need to be exempted from such regulation, and there's exactly zero reason a volunteer-run project should not be free-software.

I'm in favor of this.

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