From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Feb 26 9:37:55 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from ns.yogotech.com (ns.yogotech.com [206.127.123.66]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E580637B503 for ; Mon, 26 Feb 2001 09:37:46 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from nate@yogotech.com) Received: from nomad.yogotech.com (nomad.yogotech.com [206.127.123.131]) by ns.yogotech.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA00301; Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:37:44 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from nate@nomad.yogotech.com) Received: (from nate@localhost) by nomad.yogotech.com (8.8.8/8.8.8) id KAA20690; Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:37:43 -0700 (MST) (envelope-from nate) From: Nate Williams MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15002.37991.500583.137739@nomad.yogotech.com> Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2001 10:37:43 -0700 (MST) To: seebs@plethora.net (Peter Seebach) Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Setting memory allocators for library functions. In-Reply-To: <200102261723.f1QHN6613015@guild.plethora.net> References: <15002.36869.925599.285850@nomad.yogotech.com> <200102261723.f1QHN6613015@guild.plethora.net> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 12) "Channel Islands" XEmacs Lucid Reply-To: nate@yogotech.com (Nate Williams) Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > >Even in this case, there's no way to prove your code is not going to > >crash. > > Sure. But you can at least prove that all crashes are the result of bugs, > not merely design "features". 'Proving' something is correct is left as an excercise for the folks who have way too much time on their hand. At my previous job (SRI), we have folks who work full-time trying to prove algorithms. In general, proving out simple algorithms takes months, when the algorithm itself took 1-2 hours to design and write. Another thing is that crashes may have occurred because of invalid input, invalid output, valid but not expected input, etc... Again, memory overcommit is only *one* class of bugs that is avoided. The phrase "can't see the forest for the trees" jumps to mind. :) Nate To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message