Ask HN: Examples of software that is “done”? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Examples of software that is “done”?

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We all dream of writing software that is 100% feature complete, has no outstanding bugs, and requires no ongoing maintenance.

What are the best examples of such software? Preferably, software that is still in active use.

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IBM Mainframes have an IEFBR14 utility that sets a zero return code and does nothing else. It has a few bug reports against it but those have all been fixed and shouldn't need to be updated in the future.

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=utilities...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEFBR14

You're thinking at the high-level of software. Think about firmware and low-level software. That code needs to be those things because of the extremely expensive costs to issue recalls for fixing software bugs or getting feature updates into them. Examples include firmware in almost any appliance, toy, power tool, FM radio, cheap camera, etc.

Do you have any specific examples of devices with bug-free firmwares that I can inspect?

https://youtu.be/nruUuDalNR0

I'm very familiar with firmware extraction, I'm a security researcher who also dabbles in hardware. I've never seen a bug-free one, though. I'm looking for specific examples of software that is feature-complete and bug-free.

So the Casio F-91W is a great example. It's been in-use for decades. Does 4 things perfectly: Time, date, alarm, stopwatch.

tex and metafont will be set to versions pi and e respectively when knuth dies, and those will be their final versions

Most older Unix command-line utilities.

Some still manage to accumulate bloat… https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/1098/solaris-bin-true/

Win 7 and all the previous ones...obsoleted software can still be used

All versions of Windows use the monolithic NT kernel for backwards compat. It is the only software I can think of that stands the test of time and does 'one thing well' as per the UNIX Philosophy[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

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