Alright. So even looking at one GNU program like cat, GNU cat is almost 800 lines while plan 9 cat is a tiny amount of 35 lines just for a program that concatenates files. How can anyone defend this? GNU is bloated as hell along with the rest of the GNU utilities yet almost everyone other distro uses them exclusively. What the hell happened?
Alright. So even looking at one GNU program like cat...
Kevin Sanchez
Lucas Bell
With modern hardware the time/space cost is justified by the convenience, and people do use smaller cats and other utilities on hardware constrained/embedded systems anyway.
Liam Nguyen
most of the code is either managing the buffer or comments. plan9 doesn't have either of those.
Austin Morris
Really maeks you fiink
Aiden Ramirez
>the difference is especially apparent when using the -v option
Christopher Baker
GNU cat has a built-in help, acknowledgement of authors and a lot of comments. Is number of lines really indicative of the size of the compiled program? Won't the compiler optimize GNU cat to the point that it is not that much bigger than Plan 9 cat? And also GNU cat apparently does something to improve performance? Can somebody compare the size and the speed of the compiled programs (I'm too lazy to do this myself)?
Oliver Nelson
The comment says that GNU cat is especially faster when using the "-v" flag.
The "-v" flag was brought upon us by BSD cancer.
Plan9 considers "cat -v" to be harmful and doesn't include it at all.
Asher Wright
Who THE FUCK is the illiterate promoting this idiotic thinking? Is like this motherfucker doesn't even do real work on the command line. All the classic hackers would like to have a word with this sad incel.
Michael Clark
GNU cat is several times faster.
benchmark it
Jason Lewis
performance is bloat
features are bloat
productivity is bloat
robustness is bloat
debugging is bloat
existing is bloat
Elijah Harris
AFAIK the GNU guidelines to reimplement those unix tools stated that you should optimize for speed or size or whatever depending on how the original tool was implemented. The GNU implementation should look different than the original to avoid copyright disputes.
The first version of the unix /bin/true contained only a copyright header and no code at all. Making it a C programm with --version and --help is pointless but the result doesn't look at all like the original.
Jaxson Butler
who the fuck counts line to determine if something is bloat or not? you should be counting cpu cycles per feature, or ram, or whatever.... stop beeing a retard
David Watson
Why does Plan 9's cat look like it was written by a pajeet?
Christian Ortiz
Who cares, it's not like I've ever needed to read the source code of cat
Isaac Russell
The argument against GNU cat is that it's potentially programs (transform non-printable symbols, line numbering, ...) merged into one. The code flow becomes heavily branched as it needs to dispatch more flags and more combination of flags. And all of those programs exits in coreutils, thus there is a duplication.
It's a question rather copyright/license notice and help should be a part of a program, rather than a separate manpage document. Different projects have different coding standards for that. In particular, GNU hates manpages. When it comes to GNU's C code formatting, it's the worst thing I've ever seen.
There is some I/O buffer size detection. This quirk probably doesn't exist on Plan 9, but who knows.
Nobody cares about cat's performance desu. The question lays in programs that are used for any actual processing where performance matters. GNU Awk is significantly faster. This makes simplicity-babies cry.
Justin Harris
How?
Brody Peterson
probably one of the suckless retards
Jackson Harris
This is their policy that the code must be different from known samples in order to avoid claims of copyright infringement. Also it says right there in the code that gnu cat is optimized for speed.
Owen Taylor
>when guys code vs when girls code
Xavier Martin
How about you read the code and tell us why GNU cat is 750+ lines longer. This will be your homework, due tomorrow.
James Kelly
If you actually read both versions, you will notice that the gnu cat takes into account a metric fuckton of edgecases, making it infinitely more secure and solid. At the same time, it also supports significantly more options.
Not to mention the amount of comments in gnu cat, making it actually easy to hack around in because you actually know what's going on.
Conclusion: only a retard would use plan9's cat.
Connor Rodriguez
On the other hand, cat function is so trivial I doubt anyone would want to use the gnu advanced options.
Elijah Myers
You're honestly a retard. If you had read the code, you would know GNU cat is full of comments which will be removed by the compiler anyways and shouldn't be considered lines of code.
Mason Ortiz
That is not a bad argument at a high level but for this specific case that's not true. One might want to argue, though, that the other options of gnu cat might be better as separate tools. Does plan9 offer convenient alternatives to these missing options?