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Comment by xpaulbettsx | Hacker News Reader

While I always enjoy a good rant, I don't see why it had to be so vicious and insulting. Yeah, the guy's clearly pretty confused (if he wanted to do these kind of tricks, I'd try to use setjmp, fiddle with the structure, then longjmp to it), but there's no reason to be mean about it.

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I think it's because his indignant demand of the Cygwin team to fix this "bug" and make it work for him. Basically it's the attitude that I know my way is the right way, now fix the platform so that my program runs.

I don't see any demands in the original mail:

http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-08/msg00504.html

He questions whether it "should be fixed" in Cygwin, a perfectly reasonable request, and he fully admits that he isn't sure whether it's a problem in Cygwin or not.

"Should be fixed" is a passive aggressive way to demand it to be fixed.

His reference to Linus doing the same thing in kernel (not) sounds very much like a smack response.

Also he claims he knows what he's doing since he has done the same thing in DOS so when it's clear that he has no clue of what's going on just irrates people.

Instead of trying to walk "indignant demand" back to "passive aggressive way to demand" inch by inch, just concede that all the guy did was ask a question and make a case for why he thought Cygwin's behavior was broken. Nobody's saying Cygwin has to agree with him, but you've simply mischaracterized the start of the thread.

My interpretation is that Korn was trying to be funny (and he succeeded), but as usual the peanut gallery ruined the joke.

Yeah, but blunt brevity and "go read X instead, you're going about it wrong" would have been better for everyone involved.

You forget that the same day is not the same for everybody, Dave might just had a bad day that resulted in that response.

We are just humans. Totally unrelated input might result in a change on the output.

Very true, and very easy to forget when you're responding to a text box rather than in person.

While setjmp/longjmp is a good trick (it's how Hanson did his thread library in CII), it's actually an even less good approach by the standards of this mailing list; there are even fewer constraints on how Cygwin needs to implement longjmp than there are on how it manages %%esp.

What are the problems with setjmp/longjmp? (a honest question; I've drafted a proof-of-concept implementation of C coroutines yesterday, just to see how long it will take me to get it working -- http://gist.github.com/491302).

Because he had the same attitude with this guy: http://bugs.php.net/52435

:).

From the comments: I get this problem too. It only seems to happen if your IQ is less than 70, though.

While I always enjoy a good rant, I don't see why it had to be so vicious and insulting.

The cygwin maintainers are not known for their patience and affability.

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