[Interest] OT: Bug-free code (Was: QtSVG deprecated)

[Atlant Schmidt]

> > My over 20 years experience shows that there is no bug free software,
> > there are bugs that either have not being found yet or just ignored.
>
> Well, one example of a bug-free application would be
>
> int main()
> {
>   return 0;
> }
>
> Sure it does not do anything useful, but its pretty much bug-free. I
> agree though that real-world applications always have bugs :)

  This piece of code *MIGHT* be bug-free considered
  in isolation, but in a real world runtime environment
  with dynamic linking and fancy scheduling, I'm pretty
  sure you could detect anomalies in the execution of
  even this simple code if you tried hard enough.

  For example, what if a new process can't be created
  so the shell can't fork-and-exec this process? What
  if the handling of Flash memory failures delay the
  execution of this code? Are those anomalies? And
  remember, there's commonly in-process code that
  executes before main() is called.

  I might speculate that the only codes that might be
  bug-free are small, entirely self-contained snippets
  of assembly language loaded from some guaranteed
  loading mechanism (like the front panel toggle
  switches), but then I'm reminded of the infamous
  Pentium floating-point bug; even assembly language
  runs in a run-time environment!

  Well, maybe something small written in Verilog and
  burned into an FPGA...

                               Atlant


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