4 ms·

This one does pervasive damage to software quality though. You get a bug report, it doesn't reproduce easily. The thought is always there: "maybe their hardware

This one does pervasive damage to software quality though. You get a bug report, it doesn't reproduce easily. The thought is always there: "maybe their hardware had a transient error?". If it did you have no bug to find. That's attractive. If storage drives reported writes accurately and memory didn't occasionally silently corrupt, software falling over would be more likely to imply an error the developer is empowered to fix.

AshamedCaptain 3y ago
ECC RAM doesn't prevent _all_ hardware transient errors. It doesn't even prevent the majority of them. But whenever you get a bug report, is really the first thing that comes to mind "maybe their hardware had a transient error?"? The amount of software vs hardware bugs is still like a thousand to one, and that's _even_ for companies which receive a disproportionate amount of hardware errors (like OS vendors). For regular software, I'd bet it's a couple million to one.