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Comment by lelf | Hacker News Reader

> For example, Erlang — that funky language that people use to program systems with 99,9999999% uptime (no, that’s not an exaggeration) — has repeatedly shipped with a broken implementation of Map data structure in its standard library.

…during the period ‘maps’ was a experimental/beta-feature.

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Unless you have to type “Please enable maps even though it will break all of my code” every time you run it, that's a distinction most people will ignore. If something is useful enough to ship, people will want to use it — helping test it is even the point — and only the most prominent “This is terribly unsafe” warnings will be heeded.

So what’s more important, to be secure or to ship, then?

I think people made their choice and the developers of the said maps are not responsible for whatever comes out of map’ lack of security.

Those aren't the only options. A key part of the original comment was “in its standard library” — in the modern era where package managers have existed for decades, it's quite reasonable to develop things in separate projects and only pull them into the standard library when they're more stable. That allows people to use them without giving the weight of being in the standard library.

Similarly, you could require some sort of opt-in / runtime warning approach where you have to explicitly opt-in to having them and they're clearly marked as unstable. If you had to compile with a `ENABLE_INSECURE_MAPS` or do some sort of import from an experimental module it'd make it a lot easier for someone to recognize that they're doing something less stable than normal, similar to Rust having you mark code as unsafe.

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