4 ms·

Rebooting does not fix any bugs, it just resets the state. I'm not sure this is really the better solution because many bugs never get fixed because "Have you t

• kstenerud 5y ago
  It is the better solution because it delineates the difference between important data that must be preserved, and not important data that can be thrown out and regenerated (turning it off and on again). Systems that eliminate this difference massively increase the damage surface of your data by forcing both kinds to be treated equally and even intermix. And since software will always have bugs, your fallout damage increases exponentially. It's a lot like naive state saving code that just dumps an in-memory struct to disk: The moment that struct changes (adding/removing/changing a type or size), your load code breaks.
• thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
  Resetting the state is a necessary step when the state is corrupted. You can’t work around this with “don’t corrupt the state”. So many developers are running the other way: isolate state; reduce dependence on state; eliminate side effects; crash only software; etc. The state doesn’t need to be preserved because it simply isn’t that valuable.
• theamk 5y ago
  Rebooting (or "restarting the process" in a more limited case) does not fix the bugs, but is as a very effective workaround in a lot of cases. Yes, a lot of bugs are never going to be fixed, and we'll have to restart the machine occasionally... but Phantom's alternative is forcing machine reformat on any bug. You can do this today: just add a crash handler that will erase your entire hard disk. Do you think this will make software less buggy?