Why do you want libc to be 5 times slower than other libraries? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do you want libc to be 5 times slower than other libraries?

#11

Post by wcoenen » Fri, Jun 26, 2015, 8:10 AM UTC

marinintim wrote: post #9

> a.) GLIBC is a GPL licensed project where the copyright for the code in question has been assigned to the Free Software Foundation. All code that is contributed must be copyright assigned to the Free Software Foundation. This means that, regardless of the license of the reference code, we can not use 'open source' code from other projects unless it has been explicitly copyright assigned to the FSF. Such free softwa…

It's desirable to keep the ability to fix license issues as they pop up. But if the copyright of contributions is not assigned to a single entity, then it becomes nigh impossible to change the license of the project (e.g. to a newer version of the LGPL) because the permission of every single contributor would be required.

Re: Why do you want libc to be 5 times slower than other libraries?

#12

Post by dagw » Fri, Jun 26, 2015, 8:14 AM UTC

marinintim wrote: post #9

> a.) GLIBC is a GPL licensed project where the copyright for the code in question has been assigned to the Free Software Foundation. All code that is contributed must be copyright assigned to the Free Software Foundation. This means that, regardless of the license of the reference code, we can not use 'open source' code from other projects unless it has been explicitly copyright assigned to the FSF. Such free softwa…

You're free to take the GNU GLIBC apply your own patches and use that patched version to compile, use and ship your own software (assuming you comply with the GPL). What you are not free to do is require that your patches be included with the official distribution of GLIBC without agreeing to their terms.

Re: Why do you want libc to be 5 times slower than other libraries?

#13

Post by the_why_of_y » Fri, Jun 26, 2015, 5:30 PM UTC

Qwertious wrote: post #7

dima55 wrote: post #5

So some guy complains that a code path in libc is slow, but refuses to actually do anything to fix it. What's noteworthy here? Besides, this particular complaint is 7 years old. Poster: is this still an issue?

Why are you automatically obliged to fix it JUST because you mentioned it? If they just didn't know in the first place then everyone would have benefited, and if they did then something was clearly seriously broken in that development community.

Because in FLOSS, nobody is entitled to a pony.

Besides, the glibc developers did optimize memory and string operations, and the result was that people moaned because their buggy Adobe Flash players crashed because they were relying on particular implementation details of previous un-optimized implementations of memcpy that were explicitly not guaranteed by C99.

http://lwn.net/Articles/414467/