DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language
DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language
Posted May 5, 2022 13:52 UTC (Thu) by khim (subscriber, #9252)In reply to: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language by wtarreau
Parent article: DeVault: Announcing the Hare programming language
> The first rule should be not to break what has reliably worked for ages. *even if that was incorrect in the first place*. As Linus often explains, a bug may become a feature once everyone uses it; usage prevails over initial intent.
That's one possibility, yes. But there's another possibility: follow the standard. Dūra lēx, sed lēx.
Under that assumption you just follow the law. What law says… goes. Even if what the law says is nonsense.
That what C/C++ compiler developers promoted for years.
But if you pick that approach you cannot then turn around and say “oh, sorry, law is too harsh, I don't want to follow it”.
Either law is law and everyone has to follow it, it's enough to follow it, or it's not the law.
> I'm pretty certain that most of the recent changes were driven exclusively by pride, so say "look how smart the compiler became after my changes", forgetting that their users would like it to be trustable instead of being smart.Provenance rules are not like that. They allow clang and gcc to eliminate calls from malloc and free in some cases. This may bring amazing speedups. And if these things were an opt-in option I would have applauded these efforts and it would have been a great way to promote them and to, eventually, add them to the standard.
Instead they were introduced in a submarine patent way, without any options, not even opt-out options. And they break standards-compliant programs.
That's an act of sabotage, sorry.