2,445 karma · joined December 21, 2019
That's a great bug you found, and of course it is a compiler bug, not UB.
99.9% of the bugs I've dealt with of this sort were just pointer aliasing. Or just use-after-free. Or just buffer overruns.
The median programmer, especially in the good ol' days, wrote UB code about once every 6-10 hours.
You generally avoid O3 because it's slower. Slower to compile, and slower to run. Aggressively unrolling loops and larger inlining windows bloat code size to the degree it impacts icache.
The optimization levels aren't "how fast do you want to code to go", they're "how aggressive do you want the optimizer to be." The most aggressive optimizations are largely unproven and left in O3 until they are generally useful, at which point they move to O2.
Instead you need to use the multi-byte, general purpose encoding of `xchg` for `xchg eax, eax` to get the expected behavior.
Which is why the license is the only thing that matters. Without the license you don't have the community. It will happen with some code, it won't happen to other code. Without the license, or without the code, it never happens.
The only thing you need to do as an open source software developer is release your code under an open source license. You don't need to respond to or even maintain an issue tracker, you don't need to accept MRs into your upstream, you don't need to care about anyone else using your code.
Open source places no other obligations on a developer other than the license. To say otherwise is to fundamentally misunderstand what open source is.
It is fundamentally true. You cannot have a Pokemon community without Pokemon, a knitting community with yarn, or a software community without software.
> Technically true
You should have stopped here. It is true. Period, full stop. Everything else is fluff.
> The vast majority of software which can technically be described as "open source" is mostly inconsequential to computing or anyone's lives.
This is because the open source software movement was so overwhelming in its success it became the norm.
> He didn't need to invent a social movement and philosophy to fix his printer issue.
Yes he did. The philosophy is about the freedom to fix your printer. It is not about engaging others to fix your printer, or obliging maintainers to fix your printer.
Those things are follow ons to the core philosophy. Once you have the freedom to fix your printer, you can form communities of people also interested in fixing printers. The freedom comes first.
> Whether the original developers supported it or not is irrelevant.
It's literally the only thing we're talking about. Open source enables others to come along and support software abandoned by or simply never championed by its original creator. Without open source you do not have those later "someones".
Stallman created a social movement that just cared about code, yes. He needed the social movement to create an environment in which he could fix his printer.
The social movement was about the license and the code, not about providing support for, documentation of, or continuing development of any particular code.
By creating an environment where code is open, you allow for communities to organically form around code and maintain it. Without the environment, without the code and the license, the communities cannot form.
Everything else in open source is a cultural projection entirely ancillary to the code and the license.
> I'll just say that if you think otherwise, whatever good you think you're putting out into the world, is not much better than keeping the software proprietary.
I have never seen someone so entirely miss the point of open source. This is not a house party, this is not a community support network. There are genuine disagreements about open source philosophy, if it should be more focused on user freedoms or developer convenience, but they are all incompatible with the idea that open-source licensed code in and of itself "is not much better than keeping the software proprietary".
Stallman did not invent the GPL because he wanted an issue tracker and complete documentation from HP. He invented the GPL because he needed to fix his printer drivers.
A ton of very important open source code was thrust into the world, created immense value, but was never further supported or developed by its original developers. Off the top of my head: git, Doom, Bitcoin, and basically everything Fabrice Bellard has ever done.
Tons of open source exists as only source code and a license, nothing else. No docs, no issue tracker, nothing. People who need it use it, learn from it, remix it, whatever, but there need not be any engagement at all from the given repo's maintainer.
Notably NTPd doesn't support leap-smear, which means those who absolutely must have monotonic time can't use it at all.
These are tools, if you choose to hold them wrong no one can stop you. uv didn't invent the screw driver or the knife, its novelty is as a Swiss Army Knife which put them all in one.
This post skips all the interesting things in the modern firmware dance. Not the least of which is when you call ExitBootServices() you're already in long mode. There's no need for the journey through real and protected.
The race condition was necessary and sufficient for collapse. Absent corrective action it always leads to AWS going down. In the presence of corrective actions the severity of the failure would have been minor without other aggravating factors, but the race condition is always the cause of this failure.
Pointing out that "complex systems" have "layers of defense" is neither insightful nor useful, it's obvious. Saying that any and all failures in a given complex system lack a root cause is wrong.
Cook uses a lot of words to say not much at all. There's no concrete advise to be taken from How Complex Systems Fail, nothing to change. There's no casualty procedure or post-mortem investigation which would change a single letter of a single word in response to it. It's hot air.
Also viewing Unix pipes as some special class of file descriptor because your Intro to OS professor didn't teach you anything more sophisticated than shell pipe syntax is kinda dumb.
File descriptor-based IPC has none of the restrictions discussed in this article. They're not restricted to text (and the author does point this out), they're not restricted to linear topologies, they work perfectly fine in parallel environments (I have no idea what this section is talking about), and in Unix-land processes and threads are identically "heavy" (Windows is different).
It is good to have a simple, declarative entry point to the build system which records declarative elements of the build. The non-declarative elements of the system are configuration-as-code.
If you want configuration-as-code use Python. Please. Or Tcl if you must. Do not invent N+1 DSL for your engineers to waste time learning.
Removing ESLint means... you don't have a linter. It doesn't have an upside. Removing Tailwind means you need to write more verbose CSS. Removing Babel means you have to use older JS idioms for browser compatibility. Etc.
I don't think the Unix philosophy is universally correct either, but "too many tools" is a complaint without much consequential basis. It's an aesthetic problem not a functional one.
The correct way to teach material at the collegiate level is to teach it correctly. Useful lies and omissions are for grade school. Where material is simplified for narrative clarity, it should be in a framing that immediately points to the materials for the more fully correct information.
What matters is where the designers of the system in question got their inspiration. If they learned it from Windows, they're aping Windows. If they invented it independently, they're not imitating anyone at all.
Hardly clickbait.
In general this moves way too fast for the density of the grammar it's trying to introduce, lines like:
> We have seen Awaitors already - suspend_always is an empty awaiter type that has await_ready returns false always.
But we haven't "seen" suspend_always, it's mentioned in half a sentence in an earlier paragraph, with no further context or examples.
There's a reason Lewis Baker's writings about C++ coroutines are 5000 word monsters, the body of grammar which needs to be covered demands that level of careful and precise definition and exploration.
In the most shocking case, with Martin Griffiths, there were attempts to hold him responsible for robbery loses he had absolutely nothing to do with:
> On 2 May 2013 a robbery occurred at the Post Office which resulted in a net loss to the Post Office of £38,504.96, which was reduced to £15,845 after some of the money was recovered. Mr Griffiths was injured during the robbery; he was present in the branch when it occurred. The Post Office Investigator advised the Post Office that Mr Griffiths was partly to blame for the loss sustained by the Post Office and that he should be held responsible for part of the loss. [1]
Such a claim wouldn't even be colorable in most jurisdictions.
I disagree that anything similar could happen at this scale in the US or France. Individual cases might not be handled perfectly, but this is a systemic miscarriage of justice where at every turn individuals were prosecuted without any evidence of individual wrongdoing. It was believed money was missing, no attempt was made to discover how it went missing, and the post-masters were held responsible without further inquiry. The legal system upheld these non-findings as facts and convicted people based upon them.
[1]: Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry, 3.49
The UK legal system's ability to prosecute and penalize people without anything more than circumstantial evidence makes it unfit for purpose. It should be an embarrassment to a country that considers itself a member of the developed Western world.
You either know what you want to write or you don't. If you hate the words you wrote, write something else. If you don't know what you want to write, that's undeveloped taste, not a gap preventing your from expressing your good taste.