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by emmelaich 3299 days ago
This is why Linux and GNU has won.

It's just a trade off. For utilities whose behaviour doesn't change we're happy to improve the speed.

2 comments

And it's also a source of many bugs (in the past and likely in the future as well). In most use cases today I'd rather have a slightly slower userland which is easily read (and audited) then one which compromises quality for speed in edge cases.
IOW, Can't leave anything alone.
You're always welcome to port old, slow utilities forward. That's the beauty of open source!
This work certainly has value but it is frustrating to keep up with everything being changed. And if changes affect me do the fashions and attitudes of those making the changes have synchronicity with the way that I use computers?

In the old days I think we would have left yes in c because the compiler will build it on any platform.

My first experience with Linux is porting land.c to one of the commercial Unix. Now I first met TCP/IP on a 3B2 and later met systems sold by SMI and DEC and SCO and we all mostly constructed packets the same way and a guy called Stevens had written some nice books about this that everyone had. I think I recall the commercial and free BSD also did things the usual way. But whoever figured out this interesting phenomenon land.c demonstrated happened to be a Linux user and this platform had some different ideas about it. I saw rewriting the relevant parts as an annoying, menial task.