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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Fun? Is that not allowed anymore?

I'm sure it's deeply moving to read poetry when your program crashes in development.

But when I'm trying to resolve a production issue and I have to waste brain cycles ignoring garbage text to solve a problem, I will hunt you down.

"Come at me bro."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aS1esgRV4Rc I'm not by any means the guy who wrote that easter egg, but I'm in absolute solidarity with his sentiment. I don't want to be a Randian Ubermensh like Howard Roark, in a soviet world stripped of all artifice and caprice.

The world needs to stay playful - and my world is software. Fun isn't optional; it's absolutely necessary for the human psyche - any description of a world without it is isomorphic to a prison or a hell. The price of fun is frivolity - one man's fun is another man's "stupid waste of time". There's no way around this; it's just the table ante we have to pay for having a non-spartan culture.

Yes, the overhead cost sucks ... but the alternative has been proven to be much much worse.

If Rust is widely adopted, and if this commit adds a kilobyte to every language and every library downloaded by everyone, would the fun for the author be worth it?

Wow, a whole kilobyte! OMG.

There are many valid reasons why this should be removed, but binary size is not one of them.

Why not?

Can you do the math for me of every user on the internet times every program downloaded?

Size is certainly an important factor in embedded systems, one of the areas there is a lot of interest in Rust.

If Rust is widely adopted, it'll save megabytes per executable compared to go or a nodejs tool with all its copies of all its modules.

Really, the scale of efficiency delta between various things used on computers today is vast, and it's hard to say whether something like this "easter egg" is really significant. A few years ago I knew of a linux distro called "slitaz" that was a 30mb ISO, and it had x windows and a minimal window manager and a barebones browser and such.

Genuine question: Megabytes compared to Go? Why?

Because the Go runtime is statically linked into every binary built by Go. This is nice for deployment, since you can just plop the binary onto any ol' server, but makes for large binaries.

yes

If Rust is widely adopted, and this actually becomes a problem for anyone, someone will submit a pull request to remove it, it will be debated, and probably pass.

On the other hand, its presence in the current codebase will tend to attract playful tinkerers, which is arguably what it needs in its current stage of development.

@Someone1234 You're kidding? Try adding a new pull request in C and tell them that you want to add a text inside every compiled c program because "it's funny". I'm not sure they'll agree with you.

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2012-03/msg00049.html

Search for "Here's a nickel"

[edit: clearer source than the text around the patch: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/libgcc/soft-fp...]

That's a compile-time error message, though. It doesn't appear in compiled code, only in the source.

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