I’m talking about programs that can’t be improved no matter what. They do exactly what they’re supposed to and will never be changed.
It’ll probably have to be something small, like cd or pwd, but does such a program exist?
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
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
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.
What does perfect hello world even mean? It can be realized in many ways and none is the best way.
Computers can’t even greet you in the real world. Its like some kind of sick joke.
“Dance, clanker! Dance!”
Hahahahah
Automotive engine control computers.
They just work, for decades and millions of miles.
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Your sentence abruptly ends in a backtick - did you mean to include something more? Maybe “
wc”?
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
Thanks for the update, I somehow missed that.
To be honest, they didn’t make it easy to find
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.
Ed. It’s the standard text editor.
Notepad.exe, pre-windows 11. Now it’s something else entirely but still uses the name :(
Nah it was eternally annoying that it didn’t support Unix line endings. Also there are clearly a ton of basic features that people want from lightweight text editors.
I kinda love snipping tool.
Notepad in Windows 7 occasionally did some weird shit.
Notepad did what it needed to do, but it could be improved in a lot of ways
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…
wget.
TempleOS
The dev of left-pad made it perfect by removing it.
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.
I would have said Windows notepad but they screwed the pooch on that one and changed it.
Actually had a security vulnerability recently.
notepad++
They recently experienced an self-update hijack. Plenty of room for improvement.
That was a server side compromise, but the update function could have detected it with more security features so you’re still right.
