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A comment on Writing a Planner to solve a tricky programming optimization problem. Parent comment

Re:Writing a Planner to solve a tricky programming optimizat... by tlarkworthy on Saturday December 14, 2013 @03:24PM (#6906968)
"Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer

You are basically saying the whole UNIX philosophy of specialised reusable programs chained together is a flawed design.

Spawning a program is not slow. Store the programs file arguments on a ramdisk to avoid disk IO and there will be no noticeable overhead.

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Re:Writing a Planner to solve a tricky programming optimizat... by anonymouscowar1 on Saturday December 14, 2013 @06:12PM (#6907531)
Are you kidding me? This is pretty fucking arrogant. My $DAYJOB is FreeBSD kernel hacking.

Reusable piped programs are great for some things, especially a productive shell language. No, composing processes is not great for all things, and certainly not where performance is required. This is why FreeBSD is a monolithic kernel instead of a microkernel with processes, for example.

Spawning a program is incredibly slow, even ignoring disk read times, compared to 3 levels of low-branch-factor search in any language.

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Re:Writing a Planner to solve a tricky programming optimizat... by nn3 on Saturday December 14, 2013 @04:25PM (#6907167)
Your suggestion is the morale equivalent of asking to install Oracle for a simple "tiny data" database problem when sqlite or just a hand crafted table is far enough.
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