this post was submitted on 15 Feb 2026
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I'm talking about programs that can't be improved no matter what. They do exactly what they're supposed to and will never be changed.

It'll probably have to be something small, like cd or pwd, but does such a program exist?

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[–] IanTwenty@piefed.social 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There was a moment in time where maybe it was qmail:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qmail

Ten years after the launch of qmail 1.0, and at a time when more than a million of the Internet’s SMTP servers ran either qmail or netqmail, only four known bugs had been found in the qmail 1.0 releases, and no security issues.

More on how it was accomplished:

https://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/17/some-thoughts-on-security-after-ten-years-of-qmail-1-0/

[–] kalpol@lemmy.ca 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Djbdns was excellent too, and ezmlm,.in fact all DJB's software was quality for its single purpose. The world moved on though, and you had to have your basic Internet servers just...do more