I actually went ahead and asked Linus Torvalds himself. He said he'd never use spaces, and always used tabs from the get go. So, my theory fails :)

> What? No.

> It always used tabs.

> And by "always used tabs" I mean "mistakes probably happened, and there may be spaces in some places", but afaik I've always used hard-tabs as the normal indentation.

> If you see something else, you probably have some archive that has been reformatted.

I hope the parent was being humourous.

1 tab is 1 byte, 4 spaces is 4 bytes, so it doesn't actually work anyway.

And you can't rely on it being multiples of 4 anyway, so you'd have to iterate and check the bytes to check they are actually spaces.

So no, it's be slower, but not enough to matter.

Edit: or is the parent proposing the opposite? I sti hope they're being humourous as it still doesn't really matter

A parse of the topic on the style guide doesnt suggest anything of the sort

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...