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How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2

(cookieplmonster.github.io)
1371 points yett | 7 comments | 23 Apr 25 14:00 UTC | HN request time: 1.06s | source | bottom
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amenghra ◴[23 Apr 25 18:08 UTC] No.43774928[source]▶
IMHO, if something isn’t part of the contract, it should be randomized. Eg if iteration order of maps isn’t guaranteed in your language, then your language should go out of its way to randomize it. Otherwise, you end up with brittle code: code that works fine until it doesn’t.
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1. tantalor ◴[23 Apr 25 21:03 UTC] No.43776598[source]▶
Nope. You have to remember https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

  With a sufficient number of users of an API,
  it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
  all observable behaviors of your system
  will be depended on by somebody.
If you promise randomization, then somebody will depend on that :)

And then you can never remove it!

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2. timewizard ◴[24 Apr 25 00:43 UTC] No.43778253[source]▶
> If you promise randomization

You don't. You say the order is undefined.

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3. dwattttt ◴[24 Apr 25 03:00 UTC] No.43778894[source]▶
You can randomly not randomise it :)
4. __float ◴[24 Apr 25 03:07 UTC] No.43778928[source]▶
That isn't the point. In practice, if you provide randomness, it will be depended upon.
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5. psnehanshu ◴[24 Apr 25 03:27 UTC] No.43779002{3}[source]▶
Why is that? Is that just bad coding habits?
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6. simonask ◴[24 Apr 25 06:37 UTC] No.43779871{4}[source]▶
All of this is bad coding habits. That's why we're here.
7. scott_w ◴[24 Apr 25 09:03 UTC] No.43780617[source]▶
Semi-related: this type of thing is actually covered in the Site Reliability Engineering book by Google. They highlighted a case of a system that outperformed its SLO, so people depended on it having 100% uptime. They "fixed" this by injecting errors to go closer to their SLA, forcing downstream engineers to deal with the fact that the dependent services would sometimes fail for no reason.

I know it's easier said than done everywhere, just found it to be an interesting parallel.