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>UB This is a topic I happen to know a little about. You as a programmer should probably avoid UB for the most part, but the key point here is that programmers

>UB This is a topic I happen to know a little about. You as a programmer should probably avoid UB for the most part, but the key point here is that programmers don’t follow this rule. A while back a study found that SQLite, PostgreSQL, GCC, LLVM, Python, OpenSSL, Firefox all contained code that relied on unsigned overflow. Basically even though the C spec says it’s UB, almost every CPU you’ll run into uses twos compliment so it naturally wraps around. When compiler authors tried to aggressively optimize and broke everything they had to roll that back and/or release flags to allow users to continue using the old behavior. This kind of stuff happens all the time. The C spec is nearly worthless paper because what matters is what the compilers implement not what the spec tells them to implement. If you spend time talking to LLVM folks, breaking the world because they changed some unspecified behavior is one of their top concerns. And this is programmers who know how to read specs. Imagine you’re working on software used by nearly ever major movie studio. You think those users have ever read the spec for the software they are using? They don’t care about UB, they don’t even know the concept exists. It doesn’t matter how well tested I think my software is. Even very simple software will have unspecified and untested behavior. You give the software a little time and some users and they will start exploiting that behavior. It I unleashed some agents on our code base to implement well architected features, without reviewing their output, and could somehow magically ensure that they didn’t break any workflow that we had documented, tested, or that was even known about to our organization, the head of NBCUniversal would be on the phone with my bosses bosses bosses boss demanding we change it back to the way it was within 24 hours. Users depend on what the system does, not what you as a designer think it does. The purpose of a system is what it does. Not what it says it does. We’ve been having this argument since the waterfall days. The code is the spec. We aren’t architects drawing blueprints. The code is the blueprint. If it was that easy to design systems like this all code would already be generated from UML graphs and flowcharts like we’ve been able to do for decades.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
Back in my C days, I wrote C code that had to work on PCs that I had access to and mainframes that I never got a chance to test on on ancient compilers. Some little endian and some big endian. We had a custom make file that tried to warn against non portable behavior. But are you really arguing that I shouldn’t feel free to change private methods because some developer somewhere might use reflection to access it or I shouldn’t change the schema of Sqllite database that is deeply embedded in library folder somewhere? Or are you saying I should feel free to do char foo() { char bar = “hello world”; return bar; } and be upset when weird things happen when I upgrade my compiler? What do you think Apple would do in that situation? They have multiple times over the past 3 decades said tough noogies if you didn’t do things using the documented APIs. Jeff Bezos mandated documented interfaces and the “API mandate” in 2002z
- sarchertech 7mo ago
  You can change whatever you want, but if you make an internal change without signifying that it’s a branding change and it breaks a significant number of your important users workflows, you’re gonna have a bad time. But that’s mostly irrelevant because most software isn’t written to be used by developers who should know better than to rely on undocumented behavior. As for Amazon, the API mandate gets violated all the time. And it’s funny that you should mention them because they just started requiring a code review from a senior engineer for all merged after issues with vibe coding.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    So you know that from working at Amazon - ie they aren’t micro service focused (yes I worked at AWS) or that they break it all of the time? You keep saying you can’t break users workflows. But that doesn’t jibe with reality. In B2B, the user isn’t the customer. B2B businesses break users workflows all of the time. I know people complain about how often AWS changes the console UI all of the time and you hear the same gripes from users all of the time in consumer software. How many people cancel their SaaS contracts because of a change in UI if the features remain? Photoshop users complain (or did when I followed it closely) all of the time when Adobe broke their automations via AppleScript. They kept buying it. But the point is that you specifically said that you can’t treat a system as a system of black boxes with well defined interfaces. You damn sure better believe any implementation I started from scratch with a team I did in product companies. It’s the only way you can keep a system manageable with ramp up. And this is also part of the subject of Stevey’s “Platfotm Rant” https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 It’s the reason you can’t fathom that you don’t have to worry about spooky action at a distance when you enforce modularity at the system level. And even for customers, Apple has a long history of breaking backward compatible and while Microsoft worships at the alter of backward compatibility, major versions of Office have been breaking muscle memory UI for users since the 80s. If an end users workflow is dependent on mucking with the backend database - more of an issue with desktop software - or an undocumented feature, it’s the same. Developers have been doing that for years - changing the UI.

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago

Back in my C days, I wrote C code that had to work on PCs that I had access to and mainframes that I never got a chance to test on on ancient compilers. Some little endian and some big endian. We had a custom make file that tried to warn against non portable behavior. But are you really arguing that I shouldn’t feel free to change private methods because some developer somewhere might use reflection to access it or I shouldn’t change the schema of Sqllite database that is deeply embedded in library folder somewhere? Or are you saying I should feel free to do char foo() { char bar = “hello world”; return bar; } and be upset when weird things happen when I upgrade my compiler? What do you think Apple would do in that situation? They have multiple times over the past 3 decades said tough noogies if you didn’t do things using the documented APIs. Jeff Bezos mandated documented interfaces and the “API mandate” in 2002z

sarchertech 7mo ago
You can change whatever you want, but if you make an internal change without signifying that it’s a branding change and it breaks a significant number of your important users workflows, you’re gonna have a bad time. But that’s mostly irrelevant because most software isn’t written to be used by developers who should know better than to rely on undocumented behavior. As for Amazon, the API mandate gets violated all the time. And it’s funny that you should mention them because they just started requiring a code review from a senior engineer for all merged after issues with vibe coding.
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  So you know that from working at Amazon - ie they aren’t micro service focused (yes I worked at AWS) or that they break it all of the time? You keep saying you can’t break users workflows. But that doesn’t jibe with reality. In B2B, the user isn’t the customer. B2B businesses break users workflows all of the time. I know people complain about how often AWS changes the console UI all of the time and you hear the same gripes from users all of the time in consumer software. How many people cancel their SaaS contracts because of a change in UI if the features remain? Photoshop users complain (or did when I followed it closely) all of the time when Adobe broke their automations via AppleScript. They kept buying it. But the point is that you specifically said that you can’t treat a system as a system of black boxes with well defined interfaces. You damn sure better believe any implementation I started from scratch with a team I did in product companies. It’s the only way you can keep a system manageable with ramp up. And this is also part of the subject of Stevey’s “Platfotm Rant” https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 It’s the reason you can’t fathom that you don’t have to worry about spooky action at a distance when you enforce modularity at the system level. And even for customers, Apple has a long history of breaking backward compatible and while Microsoft worships at the alter of backward compatibility, major versions of Office have been breaking muscle memory UI for users since the 80s. If an end users workflow is dependent on mucking with the backend database - more of an issue with desktop software - or an undocumented feature, it’s the same. Developers have been doing that for years - changing the UI.