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by rightbyte
2016 days ago
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Sure but is it not mainly a case of that the more bugchecked and field tested the code is, the more obscure any bug that surface is? GCC compiles to alot of architectures. I have a hard time imagining any modern language compiling to all those platforms without quirks in practice. |
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Right. A battle-tested codebase only has subtle errors, as the obvious ones will all have been fixed. An immature codebase has subtle errors and more obvious ones.
> GCC compiles to alot of architectures. I have a hard time imagining any modern language compiling to all those platforms without quirks in practice.
Compiler bugs are a separate issue from undefined behaviour and surprising language subtleties. With mature compilers they're pretty rare, but they do happen.
JavaScript is a good example. There's no undefined behaviour in JavaScript. That's vitally important given that JavaScript engines have to be able to run untrusted code. If JavaScript code is able to cause undefined behaviour, that's a serious security issue in the engine. Such bugs do happen, of course, but they aren't all that common. Generally, JavaScript runs fine regardless of whether you're running on x86, AMD64, or AArch64. Same goes for Java.
(I admit I'm ignoring the possibility of a constrained/contained kind of undefined behaviour where the JavaScript context might see things go haywire but the process containing the JavaScript environment is unaffected.)