Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 9:41 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Yay for Clang by jmalcolm
Parent article: GNU C Library 2.43 released

To quote the "History" section on the systemd Wikipedia page: "Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers, the software engineers then working for Red Hat who initially developed systemd,"

Like many prominent Linux developers, Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers “worked for” Red Hat in the sense that Red Hat was paying them a stipend to enable them to do whatever it was that they would be doing anyway. It's not as if their boss called them into his office one morning and told them to write systemd.

Also, systemd became popular not merely because Red Hat pushed it once it was there, but because most other mainstream distributions, too, quickly realised that it was a huge improvement on the status quo (including Upstart, which had run into limitations of its design). At that point, Linux was the only Unix-like system that still relied on the System-V init approach from the 1980s; all commercial Unixes had already moved on to newer infrastructure that was more like systemd than it was like System-V init, and it was fairly clear that something new and more suitable for the 21st century was needed on the Linux side, too.