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Comment by ahbs66 | Hacker News Reader

"We didn't chase the fad of using every tool that was at our disposal". And he's even proud of it, lol

May be they have lucked out or may that is their ethos, that lets not use some of these optimizations until they have survived test of time.

There is nothing wrong to be proud about esp. given how things have turned out.

Since he was right to do so and also right about the underlying meltdown issue, perhaps deserves more than ridicule?

Huh, in what way was Theo right about Meltdown? Did he predict it? (just curious)

He predicted similar in 2007: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-misc&m=118296441702631&w=2

That's not anywhere close to a prediction of Meltdown. Meltdown is a side-channel attack that can cross the user/kernel boundary. What Theo was predicting is that all chips are getting complex MMUs to the point that there are bugs in corner cases that could be exploited to create infiltration leaks. Side channel attacks aren't bugs, insofar as no one is really promising that you can't observe side channels.

But the observable out-of-order execution used by these chips that led to Meltdown is a bug. Proof: AMD chips aren't affected by it:

> The Meltdown vulnerability primarily affects Intel microprocessors,[52] but some ARM microprocessors are also affected.[53] The vulnerability does not affect AMD microprocessors.[19][54][55][56] Intel has countered that the flaws affect all processors,[57] but AMD has denied this, saying "we believe AMD processors are not susceptible due to our use of privilege level protections within paging architecture".[58]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili...

Focusing on correctness and security isn't as popular or sexy as having the latest and greatest bleeding edge superfast stuff, until that stuff breaks and leaves your data vulnerable. But that's unpleasant, so it's easier to deflect than it is to question whether your goals should be adjusted.

Question: say you know 5 programming languages and 20 UI libraries. If tasked to write an application, you will attempt to use them all in the project?

That's a strawman. Your question is ridiculous. Features of a certain language/framework/etc != languages/frameworks/etc

That doesn’t make it a straw man, because the argument you made applies equally well to languages/frameworks and to their features.

Let's try again: would you work on your car using a chainsaw because it happens to be in your tool box?

No. I would use a more appropriate tool, because I will never refuse to use anything that's in my toolbox, like Theo did. :)

That's fine, but not a great analogy. Because once you ship software, everybody has access to that tool.

No matter if you agree or disagree, Theo/OpenBSD made a engineering choice and did what they thought was the right choice for OpenBSD users. As fellow engineers, we should realize how difficult that is, and that the discussion deserves a bit more nuance, depth and respect.

I still don't full understand the trade-offs.

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