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by enneff 3389 days ago
Comments like these are so depressing. Someone does a bunch of work to improve the Go compiler and writes a presentation to share their approach (primarily so that other people working on Go can understand and extend it), and gives it all away for free. This is textbook open source citizenry, which should be applauded.

But instead, you come along and criticize them for being too specific with their terms (!!) and also accuse them of being deceptive. This is not a marketing exercise. There is no conspiracy here.

2 comments

> writes a presentation to share their approach (primarily so that other people working on Go can understand and extend it

Perhaps Ericson2314's gripe is that it's being posted (and upvoted) on HN, rather than just a Go-specific forum (e.g. reddit.com/r/golang), and by implication it's intended to be read by a more general audience.

Well that's just silly. People post random stuff to HN all the time. That something is appears here does not mean that HN is the intended audience.
Nothing about giving your work away for free or wanting to do good necessarily puts one above criticism for misuse (or useless invention) of terminology. It's not a marketing exercise, you are correct -- all the more reason to expect a narrow use of terminology.
If you're going to be pedantic, you might at least be strictly correct. There is no existing term that would distinguish it from Go's prior state, so there is no misuse nor "useless invention". Even if there were and you were correct, this would still be pedantry at its finest.
> ...would still be pedantry at its finest.

Why would correct use of terminology be "pedantry at its finest"?

What people are concerned about is intellectual dishonesty. The presentation does not go to much effort to show, for example, why the term "mid-stack inlining" needs to be introduced for Go. Do other languages not have this kind of inlining? Does comparing and contrasting other implementations just not matter?

> Why would correct use of terminology be "pedantry at its finest"?

Because you're debating terminology when the wrong term caused no one confusion, thereby detracting from the actual conversation.

> What people are concerned about is intellectual dishonesty.

There's no cause for this concern.

> The presentation does not go to much effort to show, for example, why the term "mid-stack inlining" needs to be introduced for Go.

Sure it does; see slides 3-6.

> Do other languages not have this kind of inlining? Does comparing and contrasting other implementations just not matter?

Perhaps the author omitted it from his deck because it's impractical to cover the whole breadth of inlining in a deck that's already 35 slides long. Perhaps he simply didn't think to include it. There are a lot of likely explanations for why this wasn't included besides nefarious motives. You sound paranoid.

> There's no cause for this concern.

Well, why do you think we are bringing it up, then? Due to some nefarious motive?

My take: it's because of an unnecessarily cynical worldview coupled with a misunderstanding about the intended audience of the presentation.