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KonradKlause

glibc's abort() is even more complex:

http://sourceware.org/git/?p=glibc.git;a=blob;f=stdlib/abort...

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Most of the code in glibc has been heavily Dreppered.

very true. but glibc's abort() is IMHO ok.

What does Dreppered mean?

It's probably a quip referring to Ulrich Drepper, a kernel hacker whose personality seems to be quite controversial according to a quick Google search. I'd love to hear the GP explain it further though.

Is he a kernel hacker? I thought he was only a glibc hacker.

Ulrich Drepper is the maintainer of glibc; I don't know what the comment is intended to mean, though.

Ulrich Drepper tends to write software that is easy for him to read (one would hope) -- but is very difficult for anyone else to follow.

But you have to admit, his abort is pretty damn easy to read.

I admit it's heavily commented, and his usual tangle of preprocessor macros are blissfully absent.

But it contains hints of Drepperification, like the superfluous use of preincrement.

When I don't care about the result, I always write preinc/decrement too. Sure, it's superfluous on any non-braindead compiler (it should be able to see that you don't care about the result of a postincrement and elide the temporary), but it's just habit at this point. I fail to see how it reduces or changes readability though.

Sounds like you just have an axe to grind with Drepper.

I don't have anything personal against Drepper. I've never had any direct experience with him of any kind.

I thoroughly enjoyed his article about memory. He is obviously an extremely intelligent and knowledgeable guy.

I am afraid that he is too clever by half though, insofar as good code is clean and readable first, and clever second. Every time I've had an opportunity to interact with the glibc codebase I'm dismayed that such an important, core piece of software has been written so cleverly that it essentially can only be maintained by one guy.

That's unfortunate; I'll have to look at some glibc code sometime. Could be fun... or, as you point out, dismaying :-/

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