Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 28, 2026 18:51 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: Yay for Clang by Wol
Parent article: GNU C Library 2.43 released

And seeing as this discussion seems to be about systemd, their attitude - whether you like it or not - seems to be "we're a linux-targeted utility, so who needs to care about other systems and standards". And the result is far better performance on linux.

Correlation isn't causation. It seems to me that the main reason systemd provides good performance is that they got the basic architecture right, not that they focused exclusively on the latest version of Linux, glibc, etc. Limiting their support to the latest, greatest versions likely boosted development speed when the project was getting off the ground, but that's different from their runtime performance.

Now that systemd is mature, it's probably time to go back and improve support for systems that got left out by the choice to focus on the newest versions of the most common stuff. I don't think systemd is ever going to support a different kernel, but they are actually working on musl support. They've gone from not supporting musl at all to limited support, and there's a plausible path forward using a shim library to provide functions that aren't in musl.