You're not just living in a dream world, you're using the phrase to excuse a snide strawman. The Linux kernel is 12-20 million lines of code depending on how y

You're not just living in a dream world, you're using the phrase to excuse a snide strawman. The Linux kernel is 12-20 million lines of code depending on how you count it (and how far up the top end has gone recently). It is not possible for humans to know and comprehend the entire codebase, much less avoid all lockup bugs by reasoning about the code. In fact I'm pretty sure all extant methods of creating a correctness proof fail at that scale (even if you can ignore drivers). Much of the kernel requires specialized skills and experience the majority of kernel developers don't have. Beyond that the kernel developers value both correctness and performance. Most of these bugs involve multiprocessing and a huge amount of effort has gone into getting rid of them global locks, but even they aren't easy to reason about at that scale - I think you're missing the common thread in "deadlock" and "Global Interpreter Lock". Pretending that a world could exist where we can simply reason about something like the Linux kernel and then using it to state that devs can simplify or improve the logic is taking a completely unsupported cheap shot and the disclaimer about the real world doesn't change that. I'm not even sure what your motivation for the equivalent of "if you pretend that friction & drag don't exist it's really easy to figure out aerodynamics, so plane designers need to do better" (hint, it's not) is, but it certainly isn't to inform, contribute, or facilitate the debate.