On Fri, 4 Sep 2015 23:01:09 +0530, Christopher Fynn wrote: [...] >> On Saturday, 30 May 2015, Philippe Verdy wrote: >> >>> 2015-05-28 23:36 GMT+02:00 Andrew Cunningham : >>>> >>>> Not the first time unicode crashes things. There was the google chrome bug >>>> on osx that crashed the tab for any syriac text. >>> >>> "Unicode crashes things"? Unicode has nothing to do in those crashes caused >>> by bugs in applications that make incorrect assumptions (in fact not even >>> related to characters themselves but to the supposed behavior of the layout >>> engine. Programmers and designers for example VERY frequently forget the >>> constraints for RTL languages and make incorrect assumptions about left and >>> right sides when sizing objects, or they don't expect that the cursor will >>> advance backward and forget that some measurements can be negative: if they >>> use this negative value to compute the size of a bitmap redering surface, >>> they'll get out of memory, unchecked null pointers returned, then they will >>> crash assuming the buffer was effectively allocated. >>> These are the same kind of bugs as with the too common buffer overruns with >>> unchecked assumtions: the code is kept because "it works as is" in their >>> limited immediate tests. >>> Producing full coverage tests is a difficult and lengthy task, that >>> programmers not always have the time to do, when they are urged to produce >>> a workable solution for some clients and then given no time to improve the >>> code before the same code is distributed to a wider range of clients. >>> Commercial staffs do that frequently, they can't even read the technical >>> limitations even when they are documented by programmers... in addition the >>> commercial staff like selling softwares that will cause customers to ask >>> for support... that will be billed ! After that, programmers are >>> overwhelmed by bug reports and support requests, and have even less time to >>> design other thigs that they are working on and still have to produce. QA >>> tools may help programmers in this case by providing statistics about the >>> effective costs of producing new software with better quality, and the cost >>> of supporting it when it contains too many bugs: commercial teams like >>> those statistics because they can convert them to costs, commercial >>> margins, and billing rates. (When such QA tools are not used, programmers >>> will rapidly leave the place, they are fed up by the growing pressure to do >>> always more in the same time, with also a growing number of "urgent" >>> support requests.). >>> Those that say "Unicode crashes things" do the same thing: they make broad >>> unchecked assumptions about how things are really made or how things are >>> actually working.
Voilà a very huge part of the answer to my various questions. Iʼve joined up too late... >>> commercial staff like selling softwares that will cause customers to ask >>> for support... that will be billed ! That was my suspicion when I faced so much problems. So thereʼs nothing more to await— Thanks Philippe! Marcel
