Bash 4.0 released [LWN.net]

Bash 4.0 released

Posted Feb 23, 2009 23:15 UTC (Mon) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263)
In reply to: Bash 4.0 released by nix
Parent article: Bash 4.0 released

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 100556 2009-02-17 17:35 /bin/ls
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root  88104 2009-02-17 17:35 /bin/cp

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Bash 4.0 released

Posted Feb 23, 2009 23:52 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Er, you do realise that a lot of, say, the ls(1) binary isn't paged in
unless you use the particular features in question, right? Further, not
all extra code is necessarily bloat anyway (e.g. recent changes to find
make it quite a bit bigger... and speed it up by perhaps an order of
magnitude in some fairly common cases.)

Further than that, simple changes in CPUs account for a lot of
this 'bloat': e.g. increased alignment requirements.

You need a lot more analysis than a simple ls of the binary (not even a
size(1)!) before you can point to bloat.

The binary size you get also depends on the capabilities of the system
coreutils was built on. e.g., about 20K of what you see there is a
replacement printf(1) implementation because many glibc printfs have
lethal crash bugs in them. If the glibc coreutils was built against did
not have those bugs, it would shrink again.

ls itself (the actual binary includes pieces of gnulib, too):

4569 16762 126726 coreutils-7.0/src/ls.c

Bloat? Maybe, maybe not. Certainly it's larger than V7 ls.c. Certainly it
does more.

Bash 4.0 released

Posted Feb 24, 2009 20:48 UTC (Tue) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]

Utilities in Busybox[1] typically increase its size by <2KB (they are all
linked to same binary). Yes, they dispend with "redundant" error
handling, lack (mostly non-POSIX) features, don't tell when/which features
aren't configured in (the corresponding options just don't work) and have
now and then strange bugs, but they are definitely smaller. People doing
embedded Linux work typically have a bit of a love/hate relation with
Busybox...

[1] http://busybox.net/

Bash 4.0 released

Posted Feb 25, 2009 11:46 UTC (Wed) by jpetso (guest, #36230) [Link]

"Bloat" is increased size or less performance for features that are not useful or even
wanted. "Bloat" is not increased size or less performance per se. There also haven't been
any statements that coreutils does a bad job in performance.

So what, useful features in trade for more disk space? Hell yeah, hand me a copy of
coreutils. Minimal features for little disk space? Sure, Busybox.

Next time someone shouts "bloat", please give an explanation for the "what is actually
unnecessary" part as well.