I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.

Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn’t get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?

  • uis@lemm.ee
    3·
    5 months ago

    So you need to abuse the return type to also indicate “success” as well as a potential value the caller wanted.

    You don’t need to.

    Returnung structs, returning by pointer, signals, error flags, setjmp/longjmp, using cxa for exceptions(lol, now THIS is real abuse).