[sly010]

Nixos goes to a great length to steer towards reproduceability. They run builds in chroots, they set all ctime to past 0, they make all directories except the output directory read only, etc. But even then compilers have all sorts of quirks, like running certain code paths multiple times and deciding which one runs faster on ~this~ CPU.

The biggest conceptual mistake we are making is that by default compilers always build for ~this~ machine, linking to this libraries. This makes it so the state of the machine inherently changes with every compilation (aka compiling is not a purely functional operation anymore). If I could go back time and change automake and glibc, cross compiling and explicit dependency handling should be the norm. (As an aside, containers would greatly benefit too as you wouldn't need to package an entire linux distribution with every binary)

I am sometimes amazed, sometimes disappointed by this reproduceability problem. Computers supposed to be machines that can do the same thing again and again without a mistake, but this is not the case anymore. We have so many layers of complexity and everything is bolted together with duct tape. We focus on developer convenience in the short term but in the long term we completely loose determinism. Sure we can write more code faster than before, but building software is more problematic than ever.

Yet, somehow everything seems to be going to this direction, in fact some people celebrate it and compare it to biology or evolution. I just call is "accidentally stochastic computing".

[srtjstjsj]

> some people celebrate it and compare it to biology or evolution.

Creating life is scientifically exhilarating, but incredibly dangerous.