Bryan Cantrill of Sun (ala DTrace) has a notion of perfect code:
http://blogs.sun.com/bmc/entry/on_i_dreaming_in_code
He also has some examples (from bottom comment section of above):
Can you list a small number of examples of "software perfection"?
Posted by Russell Leighton on November 14, 2007 at 04:02 AM PST #
Russell,
My canonical small example of perfection in Solaris would be Jeff
Bonwick's mod-by-a-billion code in hrt2ts():
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/
common/os/timers.c#875
Solaris of course has lots of bigger, more complicated examples. Now
on the one hand, one wants to refrain from pointing to thousands of
lines of code and saying that there are no bugs therein, but on the
other, there are many subsystems that have been in place and in heavy
use for years without defect or modification. At the risk of being
egocentric, the cyclic subsystem (which is executed at least 100 times
per second on every Solaris system) had its last substantial fix over
six years ago, and its last fix of any flavor over three years ago:
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/src/uts/
common/os/cyclic.c
Modesty (and the lack, of course, of a proof of its correctness)
prevents me from calling the cyclic subsystem perfect -- but such as
unknown defects remain, there are damn few of them, and we can say
that they must be a result of highly usual (or at least, heretofore
unseen) circumstances.
A non-Solaris example -- and one that I've been known to use as the
canonical example of the persistence of software -- is Super Mario
Kart. This is a game that was developed (to its completion) fifteen
years ago for the Super Nintendo console. Source code, to the best of
my knowledge, is not publicly available and may indeed be lost -- but
the binaries persist and (if my coworkers are any indication) remain
in active use. Given the longevity of, say, Homer's Odyssey, there is
reason to believe that Super Mario Kart will survive in perpetuity --
that thousands of years from now, twenty-somethings somewhere will be
using the software exactly as it is used today. Is this perfection?
Perhaps not -- but it also might not be discernible from perfection...
Posted by Bryan Cantrill on November 14, 2007 at 07:51 AM PST #
Does Linux have any such examples true software perfection?
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