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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

yuri.is

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Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#11

Post by karmakaze »

dekhn wrote: post #4

Wait, are those examples real? I remember complaining about 1-bsaed indexing only to be told "julia is great! we have offsetindex". If it's a source of bugs, that ... greatly reduces my future interest in adopting the language.

I was wondering if the 1-based arrays (and option to change index base) would factor into this.

> OffsetArrays in particular proved to be a strong source of correctness bugs. The package provides an array type that leverages Julia’s flexible custom indices feature to create arrays whose indices don’t have to start at zero or one.

Array indexing is such a core thing and I don't understand why anything mathematical or scientific would start with 1.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#12

Post by s_Hogg »

NeutralForest wrote: post #3

I mean this looks like good potential targets to improve the language moving forward, it's healthy to not be in awe of your tools and push to make them better. I don't see this as "bad" honestly.

It seems like the point of the article is that that push is insubstantial, if it even exists. Given the language has been around this long it's a bit worrying that stuff like that is the potential target for moving a language forward.

Julia has always had a reputation in my mind at least of being "by academics, for academics" and there's unfortunately a dark side to that in terms of reliability and maintainability. The concept and goals are great, which is annoying. If this language had stayed focussed on the basics, it would be extremely handy for someone like me who trains and deploys models in an edge computing environment. No way I'm doing that with stuff like this going on.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#14

Post by dmos62 »

In extreme composability, it might be hard to determine where the origin of a bug is. Worse yet, when libraries start adhering and relying on the brokenness of other libraries, fixing the once minor bug isn't enough anymore. How do you address technical debt in such situations?

In my mind Julia broke new ground in terms of what happens when you create an environment where such compasibility is possible. Author's finishing thought is apt:

> Ten years ago, Julia was introduced to the world with inspiring and ambitious set of goals. I still believe that they can, one day, be achieved—but not without revisiting and revising the patterns that brought the project to the state it is in today.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#17

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

> If you pass it an array with an unusual index range, it will access out-of-bounds memory: the array access was annotated with @inbounds, which removed the bounds check.

It think making indexes configurable is a huge mistake. Even if they are not ideal for the situation, having a single way to do indexes makes a huge source of confusion and potential bugs just go away. And this is orthogonal to whether you pick 0 or 1 as your starting point, as long as the whole language embraces that.

For example with C/C++/Rust, you know it is zero based indexing. Even if it is not perfectly ideal for your formulas, the mental math of translating to zero based is with not constantly having to worry about if a library is one based or zero based and what happens if you compose them.

Re: Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem

#18

Post by p33p »

Viral frequents HN so I will be curious to see if he engages this directly in a productive manor.

There are many great qualities of Julia, and I've wanted to love it and use it in production. However, coming from the tooling and correctness of Rust leaves me thinking something is just missing in Julia. One of the links in the post references "cowboy" culture. While I don't think this is the correct nomenclature, there is a sense with looking at the package ecosystem and even Julia itself that makes me think of the pressure in academia to publish constantly. I'm not sure what to make of that, and it's simply a feeling.

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