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GNU Make has been fixed, but I wonder if there are other programs which would also have similar bugs in their code? I am reminded of when systemd exposed bugs in system startup scripts, and everybody instead started hating systemd for breaking their systems.

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I think this happens a lot with the Linux kernel. Where they struggle to maintain backwards compatibility, in the face of applications relying on undocumented implementation quirks.

I think this case is a bit different, in that the bug already triggers sometimes without this change, the change just makes it happen more often. Which is why the GNU Make bug report predates this improvement.

It's not GNU make that got fixed. It's the pipe system call that Linus optimized. Make uses pipe as a synchronization mechanism. So all programs that use pipe this will benefit.

What the parent comment is referring to is a pipe handling bug in early versions of GNU make that prevented kernel optimizations from happening earlier on.

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