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by codeflo
1768 days ago
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This may be a special case because the question comes up so often, but in general, I don’t think libraries should document all the qualities they don’t have, because that’s inexhaustible. In my opinion, if a sort function isn’t documented to do a stable sort, it must be assumed to be not stable, regardless of current implementation details. It’s often not such a big deal either: in many cases, there’s an artificial key (an id) that you can use as a tie-breaker in the comparison function. One thing I hate is when people look at the library source code to figure this kind of thing out, since any implementation detail can change with an update. Assume the most hostile implementation allowed by the docs and you’re usually fine. |
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In case you didn't already know: Hyrum's Law. https://www.hyrumslaw.com/ Even if the source code isn't provided and nothing is documented your users will rely on every observable nuance of your actual implementation anyway.
At Google's scale (internally, for their internal software where they could in principle fire people for doing this) this means if you change how the allocator works so that now putting ten foozles in the diddly triggers a fresh allocation instead of twenty, you blow up real production systems because although this behaviour was never documented somebody had measured, concluded ten doesn't allocate and designed their whole system around this belief and now South East Asia doesn't have working Google search with the new allocator behaviour...
In protocol design Hyrum's Law led to TLS 1.3 having to be spelled TLS 1.2 Resumption. If your client writes "Hi I want to speak TLS 1.3" the middleboxes freak out so nothing works. So instead every single TLS 1.3 connection you make is like, "Don't mind me, just a TLS 1.2 session resumption... also I know FlyCasualThisIsTLS1.3 and here is an ECDH key share for no reason" and the server goes "Yes, resuming your session, I too know FlyCasualThisIsTLS1.3 and here's another ECDH key share I'm just blurting out for no reason. Now, since we're just resuming a TLS 1.2 session everything else is encrypted" and idiot middleboxes go "Huh, TLS resumption, I never did really understand those, nothing to see here, carry on" and it works.