[zenhack]

It's always amazing to me how much performance work the basic gnu tools have seen in general. Grep makes some sense, but even yes(1) is fairly carefully tuned; in some cases it actually strikes me as kindof excessive, and not clearly worth the readability drop.

[smabie]

The GNU people are absolutely obsessed with correctness and performance. It's kind of annoying actually. I assume it has something to do with RMS' ties to MIT and Lisp machines (an example of staggering complexity), see Richard Gabriel's "Worse is Better" essay.

I tend to fall in the NJ school myself, though I do think Emacs is something special. And though it's derided as slow, Emacs has a ton of super crazy optimizations, especially around rendering.

Pretty much every GNU project written in C is totally unreadable and hopelessly baroque: gcc, glibc, coreutils, etc. For fun, compare some OpenBSD Unix utility implementations with their GNU counterparts. The OpenBSD tools' source code is a joy to read and represents the pinnacle of elegant C. The GNU versions are ugly as sin, but functionally superior in pretty much every way. I don't really agree with how they write code, but you got to respect the almost OCD attention to detail: no edge case goes unhandled.

World's apart from the terse and cavalier style of traditional Unix hackers.

[throwaway_pdp09]

> The GNU people are absolutely obsessed with correctness and performance. It's kind of annoying actually

I can't accept this as a criticism without some elaboration.

> The GNU versions are ugly as sin, but functionally superior in pretty much every way. I don't really agree with how they write code, but you got to respect the almost OCD attention to detail: no edge case goes unhandled.

it sounds like you want the gnu people to stop making software that is 'functionally superior in pretty much every way'.

I don't get what you're saying.

[sfoley]

RE yes’s performance, this old reddit post has a good breakdown.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unix/comments/6gxduc/how_is_gnu_yes...

[milesvp]

Oh, man, I did some firmware writing to an sd card this year. I can’t tell you just how important that 4096 boundary is for sd card performance. Tuning the buffer size to the right multiple of 4096 was important too (especially with only 48k to work with).