Memory safety is a source of bugs in languages without garbage collection and/or whatever rust does, however memory safety is not THE source of bugs. If it were then we'd expect code written in JavaScript or Python (memory safe languages) to have zero bugs, and that's definitely NOT the case. When you get the hang of C and C++ memory bugs are not very common compared the normal bugs that all software has. They still can happen but people have gotten the idea that every C program is riddled with them without seeming to realize that code written in C is the foundation for almost everything and has been for a long time. Compilers, operating systems, device drivers, network stacks, core utilities, even games are all written in C or C++ and we are not drowning in killer memory related bugs.
I started my programming career by porting code from one model of TI calculator to another. It was code I could not have written from scratch myself at the time. I learned a lot about the two different versions of TI Basic that the calculators used, but I didn't learn how the program really worked. I can't even remember now if it was Tetris or the tank game that I ported. Maybe it was both? That was a boring English class...
I totally understand why porting code is fun. It's kind of like when I checked out drawing books from the library as a kid and just traced the pictures because my own attempts at drawing were so bad. It gives you a feeling of accomplishment, even though you didn't actually do anything that difficult. And you do learn some things along the way.
Doing the same with an LLM probably gives you that similar feeling of accomplishment, even though you didn't actually do that much (sorry, hate to say it that way). I wonder if you learn even less in the process. Maybe you just learn different things.
Now that I think about it, even writing some code from scratch with an LLM is not much different than doing a porting project. Someone else did the hard work of creating the original programs that the LLM was trained on, and now you (the LLM really) are just porting/restating what someone else did. I hadn't thought of that before
Or the systemd guys, or the OpenBSD guys, or the GNU guys, or the Open Source guys, or the Oracle guy, or the Apple guy, or the Microsoft guys, or just about any leader of a big project/corporation
I've chased down plenty of esoteric bugs in my career and memory safety ones were usually the easiest. There are tools like valgrind, address sanitizer, etc. that help with those, or, like you said, there are memory safe languages (any interpreted language, for example). I've dealt with even harder to find bugs from things such as:
- misunderstood specifications
- missing else clause to an if statement
- wires with the insulation rubbed off in an embedded system with a mechanical design flaw
- accidental endless loops starving all other tasks
- priority inversion
- string encoding problems
- byte order problems
- etc., etc.
From everything I've read now about this bun project, I won't be surprised to hear that it continues to have lots of bugs even after this rewrite to rust
But it wasn't full of praise for Zig. It specifically pointed out that his project written in zig was full of memory safety bugs, and said that there was no way to get around that if the project stayed with zig. It's ludicrous!
Management style and code quality outputs are not criticisms of the person, they are judgements of the person's management skills and coding skills. Are we not allowed to do that? Or do we just need to use nicer language when doing it? I could agree with nicer language, but those were actually very relevant facts that were missing in the original blog post about the rewrite.
There are entire businesses built on sharing "through the grapevine" what management style and working conditions are like at various employers. People want to know these things!
Instead of posting on Glassdoor or whatever the latest iteration of that is, Andrew just wrote it out here (and linked to a forum to back up the claim).
It explicitly praised zig and then spent a long time implicitly damning it. The whole blog post said in short, "zig is awesome, but it's use led to endless memory related bugs in the bun code that we couldn't stay on top of, so we rewrote in Rust."
If you didn't catch that then I'm not sure we read the same article. I haven't gone past basic tutorials in either language and I was really starting to believe that zig must be worse than C or C++! After thinking about it for a minute I wondered if maybe the developer was actually, well, not very good. Andrew's blog post did a lot to explain to me the background behind this all. I really appreciated it.
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
"The VAT return prepared by the model was essentially correct: the most important number in the return, which is how much VAT the company was owed by the tax agency, was off by only 7 pence relative to the human-prepared return."
I don't know how taxes work in Europe, but in the US being "essentially" correct is not good enough for the IRS.
The paragraph after this one goes on to explain other mistakes the LLM made? Yikes
Usenet, with radarr as your user interface. Yes, you'll have to pay (on top of what you pay for Internet access) for Usenet access, but it's cheaper than paying for multiple streaming services
I hate LLMs too, but these comments are getting old. Those of us from a certain generation (who grew up using computers that this website is mimicking) were taught in our "keyboarding" classes to hit - twice to type a hyphen in the WordPerfect word processor. Guess where LLMs learned to type? By reading everything we old people wrote
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