I think its poor practice, but undefined behavior shouldn't instantly invalidate results. In fact, this mindset is what keeps people from publishing the code in the first place.
Let the scientists publish UB code, and even the artifacts produced, the executables. Then, if such problems are found in the code by professionals, they can investigate it fully and find if it leads to a tangible flaw that invalidates the research or not.
You would drive yourself mad pointing out places in math proofs where some steps, even seemingly important ones, were skipped. But the papers are not retracted unless such a gap actually holds a flaw that invalidates the rest of thr proof.
Let thdm publish their gross, awful, and even buggy code. Sometimes the bugs don't effect the outcomes.
Granted, it's not a guarantee that the results are wrong, but it's a serious issue with the experiment. I agree it wouldn't generally make sense to retract a publication unless it can be determined that the results are invalid. It should be possible to independently investigate this, if the source-code and input data are published, as they should be.
(It isn't universally true that reproduction of the experiment should be practical given that the source and data are published, as it may be difficult to reproduce supercomputer-powered experiments. iirc, training AlphaGo cost several million dollars of compute time, for instance.)
> this mindset is what keeps people from publishing the code in the first place
As I explained in [0], this attitude makes no sense at all. It has no place in modern science, and it's unfortunate the publication norms haven't caught up.
Scientific publication is meant to enable critical independent review of work, not to shield scientists from criticism from their peers, which is the exact opposite.
> Let the scientists publish UB code, and even the artifacts produced, the executables. Then, if such problems are found in the code by professionals, they can investigate it fully and find if it leads to a tangible flaw that invalidates the research or not.
I'm not sure what to make of 'professionals', but otherwise I agree, go ahead and publish the binaries too, as much as applicable. Could be a valuable addition. (In some cases it might not be possible/practical to publish machine-code binaries, such as when working with GPUs, or Java. These platforms tend to be JIT based, and hostile to dumping and restoring exact binaries.)
Let the scientists publish UB code, and even the artifacts produced, the executables. Then, if such problems are found in the code by professionals, they can investigate it fully and find if it leads to a tangible flaw that invalidates the research or not.
You would drive yourself mad pointing out places in math proofs where some steps, even seemingly important ones, were skipped. But the papers are not retracted unless such a gap actually holds a flaw that invalidates the rest of thr proof.
Let thdm publish their gross, awful, and even buggy code. Sometimes the bugs don't effect the outcomes.