“this code very fast” pull request to remove whitespace from linux kernel

[SwellJoe]

This is kinda awesome only because lots of people can't tell if it's a joke or not. I'm reasonably confident it is, but the fact that a lot of people can't tell makes it pretty funny. And, the account that posted it is seemingly new enough to programming to maybe have no idea that it's ridiculous. So, it may even be sincere, which is less funny, but still caused me to think about it for a minute.

Also, I admire the handful of people who commented with a sincere explanation about why it's wrong. I don't have that much patience, but I'm happy that people who do exist.

[crispinb]

I can't tell whether or not it's a joke.

What I can clearly see is the whole reason I left working in tech: the field is stuffed full of deeply unpleasant and unkind people.

[lomnakkus]

It's quite funny, but I think (hope) that it's a satirical poke at JS minification...?

(... which, admittedly, would be quite strange now that I think about it. I didn't check, but I assume that there was no variable renaming in the "added line". Hmm... Regardless, I had a good laugh, so it's all good.)

[whipoodle]

The diff itself is pretty funny. But yeah I have no idea how serious this is meant to be.

[Retr0spectrum]

Why don't we just compile the kernel to machine code, and distribute that instead?

This would completely eliminate waiting for kernel compilation.

[kbr]

Machine code varies depending on the platform, and Linux is meant to be distributed to a _ton_ of platforms.

[to3m]

I do indent my code, but I very rarely insert syntactically irrelevant spaces. I don't mind if clang-format (etc.) puts them in for me, but I don't add them by pressing keys myself and I don't have a problem reading code that leaves them out (since that code looks just like the code I write myself before I run it through clang-format).

This has long been my habit, since I started out on a computer with 32K RAM, where putting in extra spaces just meant you'd need to use shorter variable names to balance things out.

(Here's a photo of some representative code I wrote for a reddit contest a couple of years ago: http://ffe3.com/pics/.beeb/IMG_1373.JPG - not much different from what I wrote in the early 1990s as a teenager. But I did typically use longer variable names back then, because unlike this case I wasn't concerned about fitting the whole listing on one 40x25 screen...)

Even today, doing this still means fewer L1 cache misses in the scanner.

[copx]

Your code is still needlessly verbose.

Have you ever seen how the ancient Romans wrote Latin? Not only no white space, no interpunctuation either, and everything in uppercase. E.g: http://ratcliffe-college.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/La...

So instead of..

  FEO1:INX:LDAS:STX
 

.. you should just write:

  FEO1INXLDASSTX

Now that is concise code!

[jmull]

Ha, that takes me back.

I got started on Commodore BASIC on an 8K PET.

Your program had to share memory with the source code, so you didn't waste bytes on spaces! (You also used single character variable names as much as possible and jammed as many statements on a line as possible since the overhead per line was a few bytes.)

As a result I can still read very dense code, but I'm reformed and write code that uses white space to avoid an overly busy screen, suggest coupling in the underlying logic, aligns comments, etc.

[userbinator]

Have you done any APL? You might enjoy it.

[altotrees]

So many people taking it seriously. I have never attempted to commit anything to the kernel, but it seems like a tough crowd in some areas.

[roblabla]

I'm fairly sure that there's almost no serious kernel developer answering here. Kernel contributions don't go through github PRs but through mailing lists. The "tough crowd" you see here are trolls - not the actual community, which is inclusive and quite nice to work with.

[chainsaw10]

It doesn't compile though -- I hope.

I'm pretty sure C keywords require a space on either side...

[Jach]

Missed opportunity to put in some zero-width unicode spaces just to add that extra bit of uncertainty for whether gcc would respect it...

[Pxtl]

Solving the tabs vs spaces debate and the cr/lf debate using the Gordian Knot approach.

[AaronFriel]

Ah, someone must have mistaken this for the Gentoo repository. This sort of patch should be maintained by downstream distributions where concerns like speed are overriding concerns.

Me, personally? I found that compiling was a lot faster if I ran "rm -rf ." first.

[roywiggins]

While you're at it, minify all the symbols. That will make it much faster.

[msla]

It's almost certainly a joke, but defaulting to treating things you think are a bad idea as if they were jokes is fairly hostile behavior which makes it impossible for controversial issues to be discussed because someone will treat the side they don't support as being so obviously stupid it must be a joke, which can be dismissed without consideration.

[eigenbom]

Best joke I've heard all day.

[fka]

Seems like he made an irony. a.k.a. troll.

Details (in Turkish): https://palmiyria.blogspot.com.tr/2017/05/test-yazisi.html?m...

[fka]

However, the dates are strange.

post about this troll: 24.05.2017 github pr: 17.07.2017 the SS on post: 25.07.2017

[TazeTSchnitzel]

Wasn't there an embedded JS implementation where whitespace slowed down code execution?

[rjeli]

v8 used the string length of a function, including comments, to determine whether to inline. HotSpot used (uses?) bytecode length of a method, so adding useless lines would affect performance.

[twiss]

There was also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12119080 ("Tabs slower than spaces in Firefox")

[bmcooley]

A few years ago I was playing around with arduino, and adding comments increased the executable file size.

[tolgahanuzun]

I do not think he's joking. JS thinks in logic. :D

[phinnaeus]

Lots of people getting whooshed in the comments there.

[pvtmert]

this guy is hilarious, well i am in the same country where he is from. Turkey obviously.

[linopolus]

You could always put it through a C formatter after..

[saagarjha]

I'm pretty sure that no C formatter can handle tokens that run together.