Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

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It's about exposure to risk. Imagine you have a giant bowl of M&Ms and you ate one every day. Now say that one of them is laced with cyanide, maybe not enough to kill you, just enough to make you sick for a couple of weeks. It's a really big bowl, though - there are millions of M&Ms in there so you're probably fine to eat them. Now say 2, or 5, or 10 of the M&Ms are laced. How many M&Ms would you accept before you decided to get your M&Ms elsewhere?

Agreed that generally once you've built and tested your code with a given compiler, I seem to be as reliable with C++ as I am with other languages. But if I can remove a whole class of reasons for me to have a really bad week, that seems like a winning move.

Furthering the M&M analogy: Let's say you have a box with 10,000,000 M&Ms. 1000 of them are poisonous, and of those 1000 10 are deadly, 290 make you sick for a week, and 700 will mildly inconvenience you for a day.

My point is that removing UB is like removing 1 deadly, 20 sickening, and 70 inconveniencing M&Ms. Which, by every metric, is a great thing. The only thing that bothers me is that some people act like removing UB is equivalent to removing all 10 deadly M&Ms, which obviously isn't the case.

That analogy makes me think of meeting people. Let's say there are 10,000,000 people. 1000 have a contagious virus, and of those 1000, 10 give a deadly new coronavirus, 290 give you the common cold for a week, and 700 lead to harmless sneezing...

The new coronavirus is probably about as deadly as the seasonal flu, by the way. ;)

Oh, absolutely. Simply removing UB isn't going to solve all your problems, but it does remove some of the sneakiest ones. To keep the analogy going, let's say that all of the poisoned M&Ms were blue, except for the UB ones. So you at least know to be more wary of the blue ones and only eat them when necessary (or when you are able to put contingencies in place), but the other colours could still hit you with UB at an inopportune time.

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