[jakobnissen]

I think you must be misremembering. There were several issues linked in his post that were bugs in the core language itself.

I can find you several more, if you want. In the last 2 years I've myself filed something like 6 or 7 correctness bugs in Julia itself (not libraries), and hit at least 2 dozen, whereas I've never found a correctness bug in Python despite using it daily for 5 years.

Right now, you can go to the CodeCov of Julia and find entire functions that are simply not tested. Many of those, and they are in plain sight. And it would take less than an hour to find a dozen correctness bugs that are filed, known about, agreed to be a bug, tractable, yet still not put on the milestone for the next Julia release, which means the next Julia release will knowingly include these bugs.

I just don't know how people can see these facts and still claim Julia cares a lot about correctness. It's just not true.

If you want something actionable, here are three suggestions:

1) Do not release Julia 1.9 until codecov is at 100% (minus OS-specific branches etc.)

2) Solicit a list of tractable correctness bugs from the community and put all the ones that are agreed to be bugs and that are solvable on the 1.9 milestone.

3) Thoroughly document the interface of every exported abstract type, the print/show/display system, and other prominent interfaces, do not release 1.9 before this is done.

Edit: I apologize for implying you were not being genuine. That was uncalled for.

[ViralBShah]

I carefully mentioned that the issues (with the exception of a type intersection bug which is in the language, but was characterized as a control flow bug) are not core language issues. Julia ships with a very large standard library, and people often lump all issues in base Julia as "language issues".

I know you have yourself filed dozens of issues, many of which have been fixed. I feel it is unfair to characterize years of work by a community of people as: "Julia does not care about correctness". There's an open triage meeting that happens every other week, where all new issues are discussed and triaged. There is a fairly detailed and well-defined release process. I don't believe people are holding back on filing bugs, because they are waiting for us to solicit.

[jakobnissen]

I would argue #39460, #39385 and #39183 mentioned in the post are all correctness bugs in Julia itself.

I feel there is this weird disconnect between what is being said by e.g. Yuri, me or Dan Luu, and what is being heard by some of the core devs, and I don't understand where this disconnect is happening precisely. That is very frustrating.

I think delving into the issues with communication will only turn sour with no benefit, so let's not go there. Instead, let me be much more concrete. When I say that Julia does not put correctness as a high priority, what I mean is:

* Julia is not well tested, as can plainly be seen from the code coverage. Having all functions covered by the test suite is the absolute minimal standard of testing - I would argue that is not sufficient to consider something well tested considering Julia's generic methods. But even covering all methods with tests is still not done for Base Julia.

* When I file a bug that is eminently fixable e.g. #43235 or #43245 (or several others), it is not being fixed after months, it is not being milestoned, and new releases are being pushed out that contains the bug.

Do these two points not illustrate that more could be done to reduce the bugginess of Julia? I legitimately don't understand that one can hold the view that these two issues are not a reflection of correctness not being prioritized in Julia.

There is a broader point here about how Julia's language design and lack of safety features or tooling makes it very difficult to write correct code and enforce the correctness of it. But I feel if we can't even agree that Julia ought to have all its exported methods covered by tests, and all its bug reports fixed, then I can't see how we can have a discussion about the more complex and nuanced topics like how to enforce interfaces or contracts.

[ViralBShah]

My comments have been mainly to address the nature of the conversation here and to provide some balance. Specifically, most readers of HN are not deeply steeped in the nature of issues, and the overly broad language in some of the comments can easily give the wrong impression.

It is easy to pick a subset of bugs and weave a particular narrative. You have filed several issues, many of which are still open, and many have been addressed. Thousands of bugs are fixed for every release, including many you have filed - and Julia is better as a result.

Should Julia be better tested, yes it should be. Should we have better tooling, of course we should. Can the triage process be improved, yes. Should code coverage get to 100% - it has steadily increased over time. None of Julia's dependent libraries have 100% code coverage. Many of those projects are even larger than Julia itself. Can every possible bug identified be fixed - we would like to - but eventually there is limited developer time and everything has to be prioritized.

I will once again mention that the triage process is not a secret process. I welcome you to join some of the triage calls to give higher visibility to issues that you feel should be fixed (but are unable to provide PRs yourself for).

[ViralBShah]

Correction: It is not that every new issue is triaged on the triage call. Issues are triaged by a group of people with triage access - and the triage call focusses on issues that have the `triage` label.

[adgjlsfhk1]

also, if you want to be able to mark issues for triage, ask. we are fairly liberal in who we give tagging permissions to.

[nsajko]

All other languages and language implementations have bugs, too.

[tremon]

...and they correctly treat them as release-critical.

[nsajko]

No. Take a look at the GCC or Clang bug trackers, for example.

[wtetzner]

It’s not just bugs that are the issue, it’s correctness bugs.