Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

this is a small personal nit complaint, but increasingly I see "Linux command-line" used to refer to things which have nothing to do with command-lines per se, which to me suggests some cli-fu with p|pes || other tricky \\&\\&& if-fi $(things).

Perhaps we need some better vocabulary to separate these ideas, but the world of unix includes "shell" ideas, and their interplay with cli, there's ascii text ttys, there's ansi tty control and TUIs, and what this article is about, traditional unix userspace process-space, system calls, C-libs, compilers vs interpreters got skipped, but C-vs-Rust, just all without the overhead of GUI frameworks which brings a bit more clarity to timings but they don't absolutely, to do timings could be better to write a program to launch all these things and make sure that program is "sticky" in unix space-time.

This is a good article, but because I like to search for things again later, just as a headline I wouldn't really call this exploring Linux command-line space or time

"Exploring a C program's memory use over time, on Linux" would be more accurate. Nothing in this article deals with our three spatial dimensions, the typical use of the word "space".

For software contexts, we refer to space as memory or overall storage depending on the architecture.

Yet when refering to both space and time, you should consider explicating that space = memory, time = time.

> you should consider explicating that space = memory, time = time.

That seems unnecessary. Even a layman knows that in the context of a computer, space != physical space. Most people think of disk space, but it can also refer to memory usage [0]. The meaning of the name was obvious to me after reading the first half of the first sentence of the article. I thought it was clever :)

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_complexity

TFA covered more than just C programs.

And what exactly does TFA have to do with this conversation? It's literally not mentioned in the link or these comments (currently).

TFA stands for “the fucking article”

And I always read it as "The Featured Article"

I've always preferred "The Full Article", in contrast to reading _only_ the headline.

There is also "The Fine Article".

FWIW, all these things date back to the ancient Usenet "RTFM" (where M = manual) which would undermine an expansion of "featured" in my view (since manuals are not "featured", like links in news aggregators). The other alternative Fs still work, though.

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