Can We Trust the Libraries We Use?

Article: http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0271/

Annotation. Any large modern application consists of numerous third-party libraries, and I'd like to discuss the topic of our trust in these libraries. In books and articles, there are lots of debates about code quality, testing methods, development methodologies, and so on. But I don't remember anyone discussing the quality of bricks applications are built from. So let's talk about it today. For example, there is the Medicine Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit (ITK). I find it to be implemented pretty well. At least, I have noticed just a few bugs in its code. But I cannot say the same about the code of the third-party libraries used there. So the question is: how much can we trust such systems? Much food for thought.