Hacker News Reader

Comment by melissalobos | Hacker News Reader

I have seen it argued many times that the GNU codebases are deliberately written to be unintelligible to avoid claims of being derived from UNIX sources. If they were written in the most straightforward ways, then they would have to show that no-one working on it has seen the original sources. I believe there is even a section in the glibc manual discussing this idea.

View on HN

Sometimes it's obscenely complicated because the GNU devs like showing off with even the simplest of programs. My favorite example is GNU yes, a coreutil that's so ludicrously fast[0] that it can cause OOM states in mere seconds if you're not careful where you're redirecting output. Other HN users have compared the GNU version[1] with the BSD one[2], and I think it's a pretty good way to grok the difference in style between the two. In any case, both tools work perfectly fine for pretty much every use case.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/6gxduc/how_is_gnu_yes...

[1] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c

[2] https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/usr.bin/yes/yes.c

One more data point here is that uutils yes can be even faster than GNU yes by taking advantage of Linux's vmsplice syscall: https://github.com/uutils/coreutils/blob/main/src/uu/yes/src...

On my system it manages 20GB/s vs 6 GB/s (piping through pv into /dev/null).

Awful but plausible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com