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Linus Torvalds on aliasing

yodaiken.com

121–130 of 284 posts

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#121
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another question is would Linux become what it's become if only nice polite guys were allowed to code it?

That's irrelevant, nobody's talking about allowing or not allowing to participate, but accepting help while insulting the helpers, seems disgusting to me and I really find it weird that some people readily accept that while demanding respect and politeness in other situations. Double standards – that's what it is.

I don't see him here "insulting the helpers". He's saying the argument for this change is bad, he's saying a bunch of things in the C standard are bad, but there's nothing personal there.

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#122
post #101

raises hand I would love to be able to contribute to the linux kernel one day. But I'm unlikely to ever become part of the community when its leader behaves like this.

You have to realize that extreme PC thing is very US centric and pretty recent at that.

I'm not American. I'm just a respectful human being who expects to be treated with respect at work.

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#123
union wasn't designed for the type punning in the first place. It's just historically used for type punning.

For modern compiler, just use memcpy and compiler can optimize away the memcpy and produce the exactly same code.

But the kernel developers has some issues on trusting compiler generated code.

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#124

I would go out of my way to avoid people who communicate like this with me. People put time and energy in making software better, at least in their own eyes, for others and then they get textually abused like this by someone who has his fame to protect himself with. He also does no service to his own arguments by peppering them with childish swearing because things like "So standards are not some kind of holy book th…

When it comes to being oversensitive needy little things there is no true Scottsman.

As a northern European I find it not only comfortable that Linus runs Linux, but I would be less comfortable if it was another American smile in face pretend to be your friend but be shady as fuck attitude that you guys seem to confuse for 'professionalism'.

So let's chalk this to cultural differences. We wouldn't hire someone like you and you wouldn't hire someone like him.

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#125

I would go out of my way to avoid people who communicate like this with me. People put time and energy in making software better, at least in their own eyes, for others and then they get textually abused like this by someone who has his fame to protect himself with. He also does no service to his own arguments by peppering them with childish swearing because things like "So standards are not some kind of holy book th…

U mad bro?

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#126
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD uses BSD License, no? Or am I missing something here? https://www.freebsd.org/internal/software-license.html

BSD and MIT licenses are almost interchangeable regarding requirements to the code. They even appear as MIT/BSD in many projects.

Citations/Examples, please? I always thought these are different.

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#127
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another question is would Linux become what it's become if only nice polite guys were allowed to code it?

That's irrelevant, nobody's talking about allowing or not allowing to participate, but accepting help while insulting the helpers, seems disgusting to me and I really find it weird that some people readily accept that while demanding respect and politeness in other situations. Double standards – that's what it is.

Then you do not understand the whole point of asking this question. Its speculative whether the counterfactual "Linus is nice to everyone"-Kernel would be better or worse. Both options are possible. Like everywhere in capitalism, just being nice and doing the right thing must not always select you as a winner...

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#128
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading on a 400dpi 300nits screen in a slightly dark room, the lkml link hurts the eyes significantly more. Reading on a shitty 96dpi 100nits screen from 2004 in a bright room, the lkml link is the more readable one. Another situation of the eternal issue of "we need a web standard for specifying relative contrast", not "make everything blinding #000 on #fff".

By the CSS2 standard, #000 and #FFF are sRGB colours, with #000 targeting 0.2cd/m^2, and #FFF targeting 80cd/m^2, with adjustments for ambient light level. With CSS4, you can choose other colour-spaces instead. The web standard is there, but so long as 99% of users have setups which emit 300+cd/m^2 and say they're emitting 80, you can't do much with it. The push toward HDR displays gives us another chance to 'get it…

Yeah, it's a major issue — and with CSS there's also no easy way to set HDR colors either.

Hell most displays nowadays don't even do sRGB, which was defined as the colorspace and contrast of an average 1990 CRT.

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#129
post #43

Notice that after his rant, he still tested the code, and merged it: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/6/5/774

Well he did start the rant with "I have no problem with the code, it's just the rationale that I disagree with." And from what I've seen, Linus is nothing if not pragmatic. Good code is good code regardless of the rationale.

Re: Linus Torvalds on aliasing

#130
post #27

It's important to bear in mind that Linux isn't written in standard C - it's written in a dialect of C implemented by recent-ish versions of GCC (there is a particular minimum GCC version supported), with certain compiler switches. There's nothing wrong with this - it's an important enough project to be able to make those kinds of demands.

There's no such (real, usable) language as 'standard C'.
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