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by AlotOfReading
483 days ago
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It's amazing how many compiler issues never translate into meaningful deviations at the level of application behaviour. Code tends to be highly resilient to small execution errors, seemingly by accident. I wonder what a language/runtime would look like if it were optimized to maximize that resilience, i.e. every line could miscompile in arbitrary ways. Is there a smarter solution than computational redundancy without an isolated verifier system? |
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I do a lot of numerical programming. When developing programs based on optimization, in particular, a similar robustness-to-error property happens. Your implementation can have bugs, but it's generally hill-climbing, and so often the results generally look OK.
If you really want to verify correct operation, you have to construct hard cases, or compare with another implementation, or look at intermediate state variables, or examine the cost function at very high numerical precision, to detect trouble. Run-of-the-mill inputs will not tickle the bug hard enough to notice.