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Cake day: September 24th, 2023

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  • would not be considered bugs but maybe change requests.

    That’s just playing with semantics. They are clearly bugs. They are literally called “defect reports”.

    Without a spec how would you argue that a system/product is safe?

    1. Lots of testing, including randomised testing and ideally formal verification.
    2. Comprehensive test coverage - both code coverage (lines, branches) and functional coverage (hand written properties).
    3. Functional safety features (ECC, redundancy, error reporting & recovery, etc.)
    4. Engineering practices known to reduce the chance of bugs (strong static types, version control, CI & nightly tests, rigorous engineering processes - requirement tracking and so on, and yes ideally well written specifications for all the tools you are using).

    There are many aspects to safety and it’s definitely a good idea to have a spec for a language, but it doesn’t automatically mean safety is impossible without it.

    Software in itself cannot be safe or unsafe because without hardware it cannot do anything.

    The nice thing about abstraction is that you can talk about software without considering the hardware, more or less. If one says “this software is safe”, it means it’s safe assuming it’s running on working hardware.

    It doesn’t always hold up - sometimes the abstraction leaks, e.g. for things like spectre and rowhammer. And there are sometimes performance concerns. But it’s pretty good.



  • It’s not because we have tested this program extensively on every C++ compiler, but because the language rules of C++ say so.

    Debatable. Saying things in a prose specification doesn’t magically make them happen. Tests and reference models can though.

    I also don’t really agree with the SIL requirements that languages need to have rigorous specifications to be safe. Clearly it’s better if they do, but would your rather fly on a rocket controlled by C code or Rust code?

    IMO a specification would be really nice to have, but it main purpose is to tick a certification checkbox, which is why the only one that exists was written specifically for that purpose.


  • PDF writing isn’t too bad IMO, since you don’t need to understand the whole spec. I’ve written a PDF writer for maps from scratch and it was fairly easy and not too much code.

    PDF reading though… Yeah I’m happy to leave that to people with more time and use their libraries.

    A modern format would be nice, but I don’t think it would be anywhere near nice enough to give up how universal PDF is.