>
>
> Can you list a small number of examples of "software perfection"?
>
> Posted by Russell Leighton on November 14, 2007 at 04:02 AM PST #
>
> Russell,
>
> My canonical small example of perfection in Solaris would be Jeff
> Bonwick's mod-by-a-billion code in hrt2ts():
>
>
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/
> common/os/timers.c#875
>
> Solaris of course has lots of bigger, more complicated examples. Now
> on the one hand, one wants to refrain from pointing to thousands of
> lines of code and saying that there are no bugs therein, but on the
> other, there are many subsystems that have been in place and in heavy
> use for years without defect or modification. At the risk of being
> egocentric, the cyclic subsystem (which is executed at least 100 times
> per second on every Solaris system) had its last substantial fix over
> six years ago, and its last fix of any flavor over three years ago:
>
>
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/
> common/os/cyclic.c
>
> Modesty (and the lack, of course, of a proof of its correctness)
> prevents me from calling the cyclic subsystem perfect -- but such as
> unknown defects remain, there are damn few of them, and we can say
> that they must be a result of highly usual (or at least, heretofore
> unseen) circumstances.
>
> A non-Solaris example -- and one that I've been known to use as the
> canonical example of the persistence of software -- is Super Mario
> Kart. This is a game that was developed (to its completion) fifteen
> years ago for the Super Nintendo console. Source code, to the best of
> my knowledge, is not publicly available and may indeed be lost -- but
> the binaries persist and (if my coworkers are any indication) remain
> in active use. Given the longevity of, say, Homer's Odyssey, there is
> reason to believe that Super Mario Kart will survive in perpetuity --
> that thousands of years from now, twenty-somethings somewhere will be
> using the software exactly as it is used today. Is this perfection?
> Perhaps not -- but it also might not be discernible from perfection...
>
> Posted by Bryan Cantrill on November 14, 2007 at 07:51 AM PST #
