[CyberRabbi]

> A well-designed interactive GUI application can absolutely interact with the filesystem on its main thread without any impact to responsiveness what-so-ever. You only need threads once you need more CPU time.

Hmm. If you call open()/read()/close() on the main thread and it causes a high latency network operation because that user happens to have their home directory on a network file system like NFS or SMB, your application will appear to hang. When you design applications you can’t just assume your users have the same setup as you.

> The POSIX interfaces provide sufficient non-blocking functionality for this to be true

POSIX file system IO is always blocking, even with O_NONBLOCK. You can use something like io_uring to do non blocking file system io but that would no longer be POSIX.

> Whether or not code is buggy does not depend on whether or not the author comments on the matter.

That would depend on if you knew more about how the code is intended to work than the original author of the code. Do you presume to know more about how this code is intended to work than the original author?

[kennylevinsen]

> That would depend on if you knew more about how the code is intended to work than the original author of the code. Do you presume to know more about how this code is intended to work than the original author?

I am not sure if you are suggesting that only the author can know how code is supposed to work, that finding bugs require understanding of the code strictly superior to the author, or that the author is infallible and intended every behavior of the current operation.

Either way, this attitude would not have made for a healthy open source contribution environment.

[CyberRabbi]

> that finding bugs require understanding of the code strictly superior to the author,

Evaluating whether or not something is a bug in a specific part of a system absolutely requires understanding the intent of the code equal to the author. You have found undesirable application-level behavior and have attributed the cause to a specific line of code in the kernel but it’s possible you are missing the bigger picture of how everything is intended to work. Just because latency has been tracked down to that line of code does not mean the root source of that latency is that line of code. Symptoms vs root causes.