top | item 46060827

(no title)

engineeringwoke | 3 months ago

You can't formally verify anything that uses consensus, which is the backbone of the entire web. It's a complete non-starter.

discuss

order

DrSusanCalvin|3 months ago

Care to elaborate? Perhaps the tools to do this in practice aren't there (which just shows how young the field of software "engineering" really is), but what consensus are you talking about and how is it an obstacle to verifying code? Most of the web follows standards and protocols, which actually sort of a prerequisite for communications across different systems...

engineeringwoke|3 months ago

Basically the modern web uses orchestration, for pretty much everything. Usually Kubernetes is doing that. Theoretically protocols like RAFT are formally verifiable, but their implementations in orchestration tools like etcd have not been, and I would go so far as to say that that is an impossible task. Therefore, the entire exercise is kind of silly.