Honestly, it all starts going to shite after "hello world."
Shouldn't it be "Hello world."?
No. "Hello, world!" or you're doing it wrong.
Hahahahah
I wanted to say VLC because to me, it's the gold standard of fully working open-source software that just destroys the commercial competitors.
But it's not perfect only because society changes. New video formats forces VLC and open-source devs to adapt. Bigger video and new tech specs require VLC to update. If it wasn't for all those external needs, VLC would be perfect.
Did I also mentioned the many times rich companies wanted to buy VLC and they laughed?
Personally I prefer MPV but yeah both just wrap around FFMPEG
It’s worth noting that most commercial multimedia software is also more or less a wrapper around ffmpeg
It was fault tolerant but I wouldn't say it was perfect. There were plenty of "known issues", and the fix in production was basically, "don't do that".
It's on Github and has several PRs.
You may be interested by this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_verification.
Prominent examples of verified software systems include the CompCert verified C compiler and the seL4 high-assurance operating system kernel.
Automotive engine control computers.
They just work, for decades and millions of miles.
There was a moment in time where maybe it was qmail:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail
Ten years after the launch of qmail 1.0, and at a time when more than a million of the Internet’s SMTP servers ran either qmail or netqmail, only four known bugs had been found in the qmail 1.0 releases, and no security issues.
More on how it was accomplished:
https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/
Djbdns was excellent too, and ezmlm,.in fact all DJB's software was quality for its single purpose. The world moved on though, and you had to have your basic Internet servers just...do more
TeX?
Development is considered to be complete, and the version numbering is just adding a digit of pi. Last change was 5 years ago.
This was going to be my point. The idea that as the software slowly makes new releases the version number more and more closely approximates Pi
TeX. Best documented source, and last bug found was 12 years ago.
The 2021 release of Tex included several bug-fixes, so not quite 12 years:
https://tug.org/texmfbug/tuneup21bugs.html
See also the following list of potential bugs, that may be included in the planned 2029 release of Tex:
https://tug.org/texmfbug/newbug.html
That said, Tex is still an impressive piece of software
Is there a perfect building?
Probably not, since they exist in an environment — which is constantly changing — and are used by people — whose needs are constantly changing.
The same is true of software. Yes, programs consist of math which has objective qualities. But in order to execute in the physical world, they have to make certain assumptions which can always be invalidated.
Consider fast inverse sqrt: maybe perfect, for the time, for specific uses, on specific hardware? Probably not perfect for today.
Windows event viewer... You open it, go to the toilet, to the shower, take a coffee, ... and only 2 more minutes later, it shows you the entries...
It's so perfect, they never had to improve it in decades.
/s
For software to be perfect, can not be improved no matter what, you'd have to define a very specific and narrow scope and evaluate against that.
Environments change, text and data encoding and content changes, forms and protocol of input and output changes, opportunities and wishes to integrate or extend change.
pwd seems simple enough. cd I would already say no, with opportunities to remember folders, support globbing, fuzzy matching, history, virtual filesystems. Many of those depend on the environment you're in. Typically, shells handle globbing. There's alternative cd tools that do fuzzy matching and history, and virtual filesystems are usually abstracted away. But things change. And I would certainly like an interactive and fuzzy cd.
Now, if you define it's scope, you can say: "All that other stuff is out of scope. It's perfect within it's defined target scope." But I don't know if that's what you're looking for? It certainly doesn't mean it can't be improved no matter what.
If you just need the functionality then fzf does (among other things) exactly that. Interactive fuzzy cd.
If you use the shell bindings you can do cd foo/bar/**<tab> to get a recursive fuzzy matching or you can do alt+c to immediately find any subdirectory and directly cd into it upon pressing enter. You can also use Ctrl+T to find and insert a path into the prompt.
Thanks for the suggestion. As a first step, I set it up in Nushell with a ctrl+t shortcut:
$env.config.keybindings = (
$env.config.keybindings | append {
name: fzf_file_picker
modifier: control
keycode: char_t
mode: [emacs, vi_insert, vi_normal]
event: {
send: ExecuteHostCommand
cmd: "commandline edit --insert (fzf | str trim)"
}
}
)
Maybe I will look into more. :) I've known about fzf but I guess never gotten around to fully evaluating and integrating it.
Nushell supports fuzzy completions, globbing, and "menus" (TUI) natively. Still, the TUI aspect and possibly other forms of integrations seem like they could be worthwhile or useful as extensions.
7zip?
7zip has had few CVEs and vulnerabilities
wget.
I don't think such thing as perfect software exist, only abandoned software. If the environment changes, then the software needs changes too.
I would say git, tex, sqlite, Clojure, Steel banks common lisp are some of the candidates.
Perfect doesn't meen "not any bugs fixes or features needed" to me. I can't really define what it means to me...
Idk if it's perfect but I really like the "literate programming" version of wc
This is not the original, but here is one version of it : https://github.com/zyedidia/Literate/blob/master/examples/wc.lit
Your sentence abruptly ends in a backtick - did you mean to include something more? Maybe “wc”?
Pretty subjective but if you're looking for do one thing and do it well I'd go with some of the GNU core utils like you mentioned, vlc & ffmpeg for AV media, and sl for being a silly way to handle ls typos
Winamp! It probably had some bugs or security issues but functional it was perfect imo.
Depends on your definition of "perfect" and "improved". Is it perfect because it does one fundamental thing really well? Is it improved by adding new features?
I think what you're meaning is, is there a program that is ubiquitous (or at least works anywhere), will basically remain used forever because it does a fundamental job that will always need to be done, and it does that job in the most straightforward way possible that can't be made any algorithmically simpler, faster, etc. Probably plenty, honestly. Bitwise operations, arithmetic, fetch/store, etc. Though ubiquity/working anywhere gets rarer the higher you go from hardware. Even your suggestion of cd, for example, has to interface with an OS's file system, of which there are several common types. What it's doing is simple in concept, but will always be dependent on other programs for the file system.
Pretty certain cd and pwd have changed over the years. The kernel hasn't remained the same so the commands that use it wont and now we have faster methods to do various things like getting file data the commands that depend on it will change. Less quickly than something that is still gaining features but bit rot is a very real effect since every single part of software is in constant flux.
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