Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Ok, so my definition of "plain C" is a bit odd. There's nothing plain about it. It's disgusting C preprocessor misuse. But dang, it's kind of fun to abuse the compiler this way.

-- Linus Torvalds

Can we add a consistent "--eatmydata" type of hurdle to jump over before people are allowed to use either the so-far-less-tested tools and/or options therein? [...]

I'm nervous about ext4 coming into wider use and people finding some of the bits which aren't -quite- ready for prime time yet, and winding up with a disaster.

-- Eric Sandeen

Got a SEGV, don't worry about it anymore! Just rescue an exception and get on with life. Who cares about getting a SEGV anyway? It's just memory. I mean, when I was in school, I didn't need 100% to pass the class. Why should your memory need to be 100% correct to get the job done? A little memory corruption here and there doesn't hurt anyone.

-- NeverSayDie, get your copy today

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Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 13, 2009 7:40 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link]

One QOTW that deserved inclusion:

A quick grep shows that, in 2.6.31-rc5,
there is exactly one notifier registered.  It's in
drivers/cpuidle/cpuidle.c; here's the whole thing:

static void smp_callback(void *v)
{
	/* we already woke the CPU up, nothing more to do */
}

After deep meditation on possible race condition scenarios, I am force to
conclude that this particular notifier already has all of the protection it
needs, and that any extra locking is likely to be superfluous.

-- Jonathan Corbet

Quotes of the week

Posted Aug 13, 2009 18:41 UTC (Thu) by mb (subscriber, #50428) [Link]

Segmentation faults. Take them seriously, if you love your computer!
http://xkcd.com/371/

That's some gnarly code!

Posted Aug 13, 2009 22:07 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (2 responses)

Linus has some incredibly gnarly preprocessor (and C) code there. But then, the compiler probably likes getting abused by Linus. ;-)

That's some gnarly code!

Posted Aug 22, 2009 0:14 UTC (Sat) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link] (1 responses)

Reading about Linus shaping up some C SHA-1 routines to beat OpenSSL's asm routines on the git mailing list was incredible. Pure magic. How does he do those things?

That's some gnarly code!

Posted Aug 23, 2009 11:15 UTC (Sun) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

Practice makes perfect ?

OK, I guess experience and knowledge. Maybe some genetics, upbringing and education.

Does that answer your question ? ;-)

Ignoring segv

Posted Aug 14, 2009 18:06 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

I saw a presentation of a university paper a few years ago about ignoring program errors such as segmentation violations. It concluded that lots of programs perform passably if you press on in the face of such failures, e.g. by ignoring a store to an invalid address. Specifically, it demonstrated that simply terminating the program was worse.

The investigation concerned something sitting below the buggy program -- i.e. it wasn't about writing programs that anticipate their own bugs.