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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

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tantalor

> So correct UI applications cannot call any blocking function from their main threads.

Author is redefining "correct" to mean "has the property I care about, which in this case is performance".

There are many desirable distinct properties of a computer system: correctness, performance, security, etc.

"Correct" usually means something like "gives the right answer". It has nothing to do with performance.

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For a game like Street Fighter, you can present to someone the time at which the first frame begins and all of the input events within the game and they can calculate the unique game outcome that results. It's a bit embarrassing that we cannot have the same property in applications that we interact with using our keyboards all day, and we must constantly look at them to see if they are behaving as if we have sent the inputs we have sent.

In my experience, "Correct" means "satisfies a specification". The specification is often about the final result, but it's not limited to it.

As an example, I would call a function called "mergeSort" that takes O(n^2) time incorrect.

You can have it fast, or correct, or both, or neither.

Here's an extremely fast sorting algorithm that's incorrect:

  function cobbalSort(arr) { return arr; }

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