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I'm starting to believe that "no guarantees" should be explicitly banned. You release software, you should guarantee it.


Would you like to propose a method for guaranteeing your software is bug free?


The proposed law does not require software to be bug free.


For what use case?


Every reasonably viable use case.


This is entirely divorced from reality, then. You'd have to make the code resilient to failure modes specific to operating environments you're entirely unaware of while authoring the code. E.g. someone takes your code and cross-compiles it for use as part of one of several daemons running in an embedded system on an architecture you never tested on, and it leaks memory in that environment due to how to OS allocates memory there. I'm not thrilled with this example I just made up, but I hope it captures the distinction between writing an algorithm and deploying a full solution into a known environment.

The idea that software engineers can 'guarantee' against this is fantasy and precisely what integration testing is for. It has to be the case that those who deploy the code take responsibility for its behavior, not the original authors, since only those deploying have the full picture of the system.




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