[ddevault]

Perhaps indeed! But a crucial distinction is that I consider the complexity in the langauge, compiler, and standard library to all be influences on your program's total complexity as well. Using std::List (or whatever you call it) has the same total complexity as writing your own little growable array.

[roca]

From the point of view of bugginess, complexity in the implementations of massively popular libraries is far less of an issue than code you just wrote yourself, because the code in those libraries will have received much more testing than the code you just wrote yourself. So it doesn't really make sense to just add the complexity of components up like that.

[joveian]

sudo is quite a popular utility, by the same logic it might be expected to be well tested...

[swsieber]

Yes. And I shudder to think just how many bugs there would be in a home-grown sudo replacement.