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by MrQuincle 3135 days ago
I've had enough of small utilities that didn't work as expected. Also ls or mkdir can for example be part of busybox ported to a Blackfin. No guarantees that there are no bugs in these by far!

Edit: here you have the source code for the "small" ls utility: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/src/ls.c. Yes, over 5000 lines.

2 comments

Your claim was that "there is no software without bugs". I'm pointing out that this is true only in the narrow philosophical sense. You cannot draw a perfect circle, either. But you can draw a circle that gets pretty damn close.

Software cannot be perfect but this doesn't mean that software needs to be shoddy. sqlite is a complex product and it has orders of magnitude fewer bugs than other projects of similar complexity.

It is factually, observably, possible to create software that is very close to perfect, it just takes a lot of hard work. Software has a reputation for being buggy not because it's impossible to write flawless software, but because most software is really poorly written.

The feature bloat is typical for gnu coreutils; for reference ls.c for OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD is 614, 716, 933 lines respectively [1][2][3]

[1] https://github.com/Bluerise/OpenBSD-src/blob/master/bin/ls/l... [2] cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/~checkout~/src/bin/ls/ls.c?rev=1.75.4.1 [3] https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/bin/ls/ls.c