Cliff L. Biffle’s blog post delves into a debugging journey at Oxide titled “Who killed the network switch?” The code written assumed loaned memory would fit into one region, an invariant that became obsolete with task packing implementation. As systems evolve, the implicit invariants coded in could be unknowingly violated by future changes, leading to failure modes. These time bombs are impossible to enforce explicitly and lurk in every system. This highlights the unpredictable nature of software development, where assumptions made in the past can cause issues in the future. The post was published on March 26, 2024.
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2024/03/26/the-problem-with-invariants-is-that-they-change-over-time/