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Comment by fetbaffe | Hacker News Reader

"every single computing device, billions of them, are working non-stop, days and weeks and months on end"

working non-stop? No, they don't. Today’s computers are filled with bugs because bad implementations that comes from bad implementation languages and bad tooling.

The reason C++ is used is because backwards compability/legacy/history trumps everything else. Just look at MS Windows for a proof for that. Or x86 CPU architecture.

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working non-stop? No, they don't.

Those are claims that go against my personal experience (pretty much every device and server system I control has uptime in weeks or months). So unless you can actually show me some hard data to the contrary...

Are you claiming that there are never any crashes or downtime in any device?

Sigh. No. Where did I say "never crashes" ?

You on the other hand seem to be implying that a different programming model will result in a never crashing system at the scale of the current internet.

You claimed non-stop without any facts or anything.

I'm saying that we could have way fewer bugs and crashes with better languages and tooling.

Erlang crowd seems to `put their money where their mouth is` regarding this question.

Remember Erlang runtime is also written in C ultimately. I would have believed claims about Erlang "never crashes" if I hadn't had to personally debug mysterious hangs in Erlang runtime (running RabbitMQ):

http://erlang.2086793.n4.nabble.com/infinite-loop-when-beam-...

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