[dalke]

The dragon cannot be slain, only pushed back. It is the halting problem.

Yes, further automated analysis can find some of these problem. That's what the author of the essay proposes, and it's good to know that there are some solutions.

Let's go down the road further and expand the system so there are multiple loggers, and where subsystem logger configuration via an external configuration file occurs at run-time. Some configurations are acyclic, others are not.

This could be prohibited by edict - if a program cannot be analyzed then it's not valid. As the essay points out, there are also formal verification techniques - and that very few people use them. As I pointed out, it's surprisingly easy to make a Turing machine by accident. (See http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/accidentally_turing_complet... and its HN comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6577671 .)

In practice then, it's very unlikely that most complex software will be able to use these tools, because it's hard to restrict the solution space to what those tools can analyze.

Here there be dragons.