The Architecture of a Mistake We Just Learned to Live With
In August 1173, work started on constructing a bell tower in Tuscany. It was expected to stand tall for many centuries. However, within 5 years, the ground underneath began to sink.
Instead of tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch, the engineers in Pisa freaked out. They tried to compensate by making the higher floors lopsided.
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Unfortunately, this made the weight of the whole tower increase and cause it to sink even more. For over eight centuries we have stared in awe at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, not in horror of its engineering disaster, but in joy of its quirky nature. We joke about it, and we hold it up using underground cables and lead weights.
We do exactly this in software engineering.
We have built huge and fast systems on sinking foundations. The left side is our super fast manual memory management. If we forget to deallocate or we have a dangling pointer we can cause our high performance daemon to become a timebomb. The right side is the comfort of our automatic garbage collection or large runtimes which can slow our CPU down.
For years we have used shoring up techniques to make sure our towers don’t fall down. This has included writing wrappers, adding safety features or simply just accepting that we will have memory leaks and race conditions due to the quirky nature of our systems.
We write software using low level languages, but are then given a loaded gun.
I was getting tired of being careful. A system that enforced no possibility of incorrect pointer management, without slowing the CPU by introducing garbage collection.
This is what led me down the rabbit hole to develop SORM (Static Ownership Resolution Model), by getting rid of my complaints about current paradigms.
