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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I'm afraid that at some point, we'll realize there are issues with the software we're using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.

Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn't get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (28 children)

I would say the whole set of C based assumptions underlying most modern software, specifically errors being just an integer constant that is translated into a text so it has no details about the operation tried (who tried to do what to which object and why did that fail).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (12 children)

You mean 0 indicating success and any other value indicating some arbitrary meaning? I don't see any problem with that.

Passing around extra error handling info for the worst case isn't free, and the worst case doesn't happen 99.999% of the time. No reason to spend extra cycles and memory hurting performance just to make debugging easier. That's what debug/instrumented builds are for.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Ugh, I do not miss C...

Errors and return values are, and should be, different things. Almost every other language figured this out and handles it better than C.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's more of an ABI thing though, C just doesn't have error handling.

And if you do exception handling wrong in most other languages, you hamstring your performance.