[troutwine]

I didn't catch the word "bloat" in the linked article, nor really any hint of such a complaint. Rather, it seems like the OpenBSD has happily announced the removal of C++ in their base because of compilation speed issues.

> Groff was also one of the slowest parts in a full build...

C++ compilers might be many things, but zippy they are not.

[dchest]

Well, C++ compiler is bloat, as is standard library. There's an effort to use Portable C Compiler (which recently reached 1.0 http://pcc.ludd.ltu.se/news/) to compile OpenBSD.

Plus, from mandoc website (http://mdocml.bsd.lv/):

Why? groff amounts to over 5 MB of source code, ...

[goalieca]

> and its replacement is much faster in rendering manpages

Besides the build bloat, that certainly hints at it.

[tzs]

Mandoc is a tool specifically for formatting man pages. Groff is a general typesetting tool. That probably accounts for most if not all of the difference in speed.

[jrockway]

Probably a good choice. For a workstation, you might encounter the need for a typesetting system. But for your router, you probably don't need it. So I think OpenBSD made the right choice about what to ship in core.

[JoachimSchipper]

troff is technically a general-purpose typesetting system, but how many people are still using it for anything other than formatting man pages? (La)TeX and other formats have pretty much taken over.

[wladimir]

Indeed. I hope Linux distributions will follow with replacing Groff. It's a huge, slow, ancient system and for the purpose of formatting manpages it can be replaced by a 15-line Python script.

(this has nothing to do with C++ versus C, simply with removing some bloated UNIX legacy code)

[JoachimSchipper]

Well, 15 lines is a bit optimistic. mandoc is ~25 000 lines of C, and not yet complete.