According to the co-founder Ethereum According to Vitalik Buterin, developers who prioritize security can expect bug-free code to become a reality in the 2030s.
After the controversial hard fork Gnosis Chain, which aims to recover $9,4 million stolen in the Balancer hack, Buterin said that in the 2030s it will no longer be possible to say that «errors are inevitable, it is impossible to write code without errors.»
Co-founder Ethereum suggested that a breakthrough solution could be multi-level redundancy, allowing for filtering out gaps between design and implementation. He pointed to type systems as one form of redundancy, and formal verification of specific assertions about code as another level.
Formal verification can identify issues such as integer truncation and overflow, reentrancy, and inefficient gas optimization that may escape the attention of auditors and testers. Meanwhile, traditional testing can only verify the presence of errors, not their absence.
Buterin also noted that some programs will continue to contain bugs because, in certain cases, functionality is more important than perfection. However, developers who prioritize security will have the tools to create truly bug-free code.