Re:Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
by remus on Wednesday January 03, 2024 @11:49AM
(#38856283)
I don't think it is so black and white. The original authors made trade offs that made sense at the time, but in the intervening period the context has changed and those trade offs don't necessarily make sense. The parents point is obviously exaggerated, but currently disk is cheap and the cost of inscrutable code, especially code that is run by millions or even billions of people, is extremely high: bugs are harder to spot and harder to fix, the barrier to entry for new maintainers is high, new features are harder to add etc.
I disagree. Sure, 6 bytes is approximately free in most contexts, but 100MB is not free, and 5GB is even less free.
But more importantly, writing code under constraints can force good behavior. For example, BIOS is a legacy mess but it’s a small, self-contained legacy mess that fits in a few kB. Compare to UEFI, which is unbelievably complicated and bug-ridden. A mess like UEFI could not have fit within the constraints of BIOS.
This is not to say that writing obscure code to save a couple bytes of source file size is at all worthwhile any more, but the idea that one should constrain bloat (design bloat, code bloat, executable bloat, network bloat, etc) is very much still valuable.