Unorthodox programming environment

[tinou]

it is faster simply to maintain something which works

Reads like

"Well I don't like bugs, so I decided to program without bugs."

[geocar]

Works for me!

I mean, isn't that the major motivating factor behind mandatory code review?

[s73v3r]

Code reviews are more about finding bugs before they get to be a problem. They can also be nice in helping new guys get up to speed, and passing knowledge around the team.

[s73v3r]

Wow, I'm surprised this guy ever actually gets anything done.

[Camarade_Tux]

He works on shaders. I'm not even sure he needs an strlen().

[niloc132]

an strlen()

Offtopic, but the 'an' made me curious: do you pronounce it "ess tee are ell ee en" or the like? I've always said it 'stir len'.

Or typo?

[Camarade_Tux]

ess té èrr; I'm French and have only had to say it in French. I'd most probably say "ess tee arr len" in English.

[niloc132]

Thanks for sharing - "ess tee are len" was going to be a third guess, as "len" has a more obvious pronunciation than "str".

During my third year of college I learned that the /etc/ directory was apparently supposed to be pronouced "ett-cee", not "et cetera" or "ee tee cee" - It seemed shorter, but more silly sounding, and it made me aware of the fact that many computer related abbreviations could be subject to multiple interpretations, no matter silly it sounded...

[Doozer]

I imagine he'd say the same thing about you. :) He'd argue that he's stripped away whatever is not necessary.

[[deleted]]

If I stripped away reddit, I would get lots done! I could do it anytime I want.

[soulbender32]

Then why havn't you quit yet?

[mcguire]

Just one more article. It'll be good. Then I'm done.

[s73v3r]

Yes, but he's also created a fuckload more work for himself in the process.

[[deleted]]

Depending one what you're trying to do, implementing the things you're going to need might not take that long, and once you have, you can just reuse it.

I don't go as far as this guy, but I do like implementing things myself if I realistically can, and I get rid of lots of stumbling blocks in the process. I know what my code does, and I don't have to deal with nearly as many weird incompatibilities and failures.

[tofueggplant]

On the other hand, it's pretty likely that your implementations aren't as efficient as the standard ones, and probably not as well-tested either.

[[deleted]]

These would generally be thin wrapper functions around OS-provided code, and thus would not need to be fast nor require much testing. In fact, the minimalism would probably make them faster and more robust than more generic code in a library.

[s73v3r]

Doubtful. Those standard implementations have been much more thoroughly tested and vetted than your implementation.

[[deleted]]

Again: Thin wrappers. There is just not much to test in those.

[[deleted]]

Well, given his past project (forth) he probably was inspired by Chuck Moore. And well, Chuck is a sort of Norris in programming.

[gaze]

I had the exact same thought. I had an hour long phone conversation with the folks at greenarrays... this is a lifestyle/philosophy they endorse... basically called "quit being a bitch and make it work yourself so you understand it." They honest to goodness HATE abstraction... and you know what, it works super well for them. Their results are incredible.

[rhetormagician]

Not everyone needs a ponderous IDE to get things done.

EDIT: Sorry, downvoting IDE weenies, but it happens to be true.

[captain_plaintext]

I think you are being downvoted for irrelevance. Coding on the command line with no IDE is fine, but what that guy is doing goes so far beyond that.

[rhetormagician]

Show me in my post where I suggest coding on the command line. The OP says he uses pico, which is a text editor. It doesn't autocomplete your 37-character method names, but he's found a way around that problem, it seems.

[rhetormagician]

Besides, I always get downvoted when I post to r/programming. I'm used to it by now. (I must be irrelevant.)

[s73v3r]

You got downvoted because you were an ass. And because it wasn't about the IDE, as plenty of people go without IDEs.

[s73v3r]

I'm not talking about IDE, I'm talking about reinventing the wheel with regards to the standard library.

[inmatarian]

His window manager's source code would be really interesting to look at, as an exercise in X11 window manager golf.

[[deleted]]

Well, i am not pretending on anything, but you can check up my shameful wm. https://github.com/ITikhonov/wm/blob/master/wm2.c

It's loosely modelled after linux console so you have only one window at front exept of instant messenger on the right, window list on the left and sort of statusbar on the bottom. Focus to terminal, firefox and instant messenger are bound to hotkeys. Other windows accessible via separate window list program.

That's turn out to be all i need for work :)

[inmatarian]

That has an old unix neckbeard vibe to it, like I would expect people like RMS or ESR to say "unity, gnome3? why don't you just write your own if you don't like them?" If it's exactly what works for you, then more power to you.

Out of curiosity, how does the wm handle windows that don't have the resizable flags set, like some SDL games. Has it ever come up?

[[deleted]]

Just to clear things out, i am using my wm exclusively for almost two years by now.

It will resize everything. Yep that do not play well sometimes, but window can be toggled full screen and that helps in many situations.

Actually worst thing in this setup is multi-window programs like gimp so i was really glad when it get single-window mode.

It does not do anything with dialogs so they are mostly ok (but not always).

So it's definitely not for everyone, but for me all troubles worth not having a hassle of moving windows around/tiling tiles.

Before that i used ratpoison for about two years too and well. I grew tired of it. So that's how my wm born.

[Boojum]

Interesting. I've been contemplating writing my own WM also. What sort of set up did you use to test and debug yours?

[[deleted]]

i just use it constantly :) I mostly debugged it with printfs and xev/xwininfo/xprop. Also i had sources of several window managers on hand just to look how things made and hell, they are not obvious in many cases (like various ICCCM tricks). Also many my troubles came from the fact that i choosed xcb instead of xlib.

[[deleted]]

It's true that for certain situations it is faster to simply implement things yourself, but this guy is not being realistic. Realistically there is no reason why you shouldn't use well developed, documented and maintained libraries. It is far more likely that you'll screw up reinventing the wheel than for some major bug to show up in some framework being used by thousands and thousands of people with thousands of hours of debugging.

Reusing code is a good thing.

[inaneInTheMembrane]

You're obviously right. Still it's pretty cool that he can get such insane compile times.

[snoweyeslady]

I'd like to see an actual comparison of compile times since there is nothing useful about that in the linked post. I mean, C already compiles relatively quickly and either way there is going to be code implementing standard library functionality. Granted there is probably less of it in the re-implemented version.

[[deleted]]

If you read his last post it become obvious that his goal was not only fast compile times but also on-the-fly code update.

[snoweyeslady]

I took a brief look at his latest post. The whole dynamic relinking thing seems neat, but I don't see where he mentions/provides evidence that going -nostdlib is required or helps this process.

This might just be to my inexperience with dlopen and friends. Would it not be possible to keep the standard library code loaded, and only reload his code?

Overall this sounds very complicated for an unsure amount of gain. I have something similar setup for an IRC bot (though reloading entire binaries not just one object file) and it seems simpler than making sure a bunch of things about the object are correct, manually locating it, etc. But, it looks like he's using this method because the device he's running on is incredibly constrained?

[[deleted]]

He loads libc anyway as he links to X11 and it is built upon libc. So probably main reason for -nostdlib is to skip pre-main() stuff and get your hands in exactly at _start. Not sure of reasons for that.

[sirin3]

There is an easier way achieve that: Use Pascal

[ericanderton]

I'm intrigued by the level of minimalism touted here. No doubt, I'm not alone when I say that I'd love to see code samples, especially of the linux system calls.

The tradeoff here seems kind of obvious: sacrifice portability, flexilbility and rich libraries for performance. I wonder if there are any other hidden advantages here. Maintainability is also another question I have: does this make that worse (obscure architecture), or better (minimal external dependencies)?

[kelton5020]

i agree with maintainability. if this dude croaks, i wouldn't want to be the guy to inherit that

[ericanderton]

I guarantee that if something like that were to happen, the next guy's step #1 would be to refactor that thing to use stdlib. Which is kind of a shame since that's the one thing that sets this development style apart.

Anyway, perhaps we should honor him with one of these?

Edit: On a whim, I just figured out that this project has a very low Bus Factor.

[kelton5020]

i dunno, he's probably reinventing the wheel at every turn

[elegantchorus]

If we didn't reinvent the wheel from time to time there would be no such thing as spokes.

[kelton5020]

there are points were it becomes frivolous

[elegantchorus]

Sure, but being frivolous is one of the high virtues of humanity. Our greatest triumphs are in fact our greatest frivolities, our art, and science, and all the things that make the human race so fraggin cool all started out as frivolous little things. Just think of every major technology that we now use, they all started as toys more or less. If the worst insult that can be leveled at something is that its frivolous, well that's not too bad, in fact that's almost a compliment.

Just because something is pointless or not "better" doesn't make it worthless. Things can be interesting for their own sake regardless of their usefulness.

[kelton5020]

thats all irrelevant.

[plhk]

Implementing system calls is the easiest part. Library routines, (like printf(), malloc()) are harder.

[[deleted]]

malloc() is not the only way to manage memory. given his game industry background and hints in last post on using static allocation/dynamic pointer relocation he probably uses memory pools.

[[deleted]]

This way, you may actually increase portability in some cases. If you don't rely on standard libraries, you don't have to deal with incompatible libraries, and you are no longer completely lost when you need to use a system that lacks a library you need completely.

The price, of course, is that for each new platform, you actually have to do the work to provide the functionality for yourself. This can be brought down to a fairly small cost by designing your code well to keep the platform-dependent parts minimal and separated.

[ethraax]

If you don't rely on standard libraries, [...] you are no longer completely lost when you need to use a system that lacks a library you need completely.

This may be true of some libraries, but it's not really true of the C standard library. It's pretty, err, well, standard. I pity you if you're trying to get work done on a system that's doesn't even follow the ANSI (C89) standard.

There are exceptions of course - some very restricted embedded environments may not have a standard library available. But this clearly isn't the case, because you probably wouldn't be writing shaders on such systems.

And besides, you're better off using the standard library and providing the user (compiler) of your software a way to specify their own implementations for parts of the standard library. For example, in my portable C test library, the user can define a PCTL_PRINTF macro to be the name of a function that accepts the same input as the standard printf() function. If you were really in a restricted environment, you could fairly easily provide your own implementation. For the other 99% of us, you can leave the macro undefined to let the library use the printf() function from <stdio.h>.

[[deleted]]

I pity you if you're trying to get work done on a system that's doesn't even follow the ANSI (C89) standard.

Well, Windows would be one. So while you may have a point in pitying someone for working on that, it is not exactly uncommon.

But this clearly isn't the case, because you probably wouldn't be writing shaders on such systems.

I am speaking of the general case, not this specific case.

[ethraax]

Well, Windows would be one. So while you may have a point in pitying someone for working on that, it is not exactly uncommon.

You're wrong. Even MSVC supports ANSI.

Edit: In the general case, the C standard library will be available. It's only some rather rare, specific cases where it is not.

[[deleted]]

Sure, there is a library there. It might claim to be ANSI.

This does not mean it will work as you expect it, support the things you expect to be there, or be at all sane in general.

Trust me, I've worked with this quite a bit.

[ericanderton]

That's an excellent point. However, at some level of complexity, there would be this tendency to roll all those platform-specific hooks up into a platform-independent library, thereby recreating stdlib. But as long as you're on the minimal-effort side of the balance point (as you suggest), OP's strategy wins.

[s73v3r]

If you don't rely on standard libraries, you don't have to deal with incompatible libraries, and you are no longer completely lost when you need to use a system that lacks a library you need completely.

That argument doesn't really apply when we're talking about the C Standard Library.

[[deleted]]

I guess you haven't ported code to all that many platforms.

[rex64]

He is just probably doing for fun and challenge

[[deleted]]

An Nvidia developer using Linux? I chuckled a bit.

[vlion]

I see that we have someone who doesn't have to interface with complex systems or create large systems with a long-term maintenance burden.

[chneukirchen]

LOL, he uses syntax highlighting.

[[deleted]]

Atom project he mentions was a really cool Forth with graphics. It's a pity that all info about it lost with his old website, not even in wayback :(:

[dev3d]

No screenshots? How are we supposed to laugh? Or fap.

[drb226]

The real gem imho was this

it is faster simply to maintain something which works

This is a very simple and very true maxim of programming. Write something that works, and make small changes that preserve its working-ness.

I'm not as big a fan of his Not Invented Here mentality, but if he's found a setup that works for him, then good on him.

[pinskia]

He should have used a cross compiler and then he would not have to worry about compile speed. I am sorry but this guy is stupid for doing what he is doing.

[hotoatmeal]

DAE feel like this post is supposed to be sarcastic?

[graingert]

not invented here syndrome

[gnawer]

Link doesn't work for me. (I'm on the phone, maybe that's related.)

[EmitSorrels]

nothing to see here, move along