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For those wondering why they may have done this, there’s a relevant section in the GNU Coding Standards: https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Reading-N
by ryukafalz 4y ago
For those wondering why they may have done this, there’s a relevant section in the GNU Coding Standards:
https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Reading-Non_002dFree-Code.html#Reading-Non_002dFree-Code https://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Reading-Non_002...
This appears to be a case where they went for speed rather than simplicity.
- bauruine 4y agoThanks for the link. That was what I was thinking about when writing my response about "complex code to do trivial things is kind of a meme." but i couldn't find it.
- dc-programmer 4y agoIs this for legal or product reasons or both? It’s hard to tell from the link.
- ryukafalz 4y agoLegal reasons; it's in a section titled "Legal Issues". The idea is if you're cloning an existing program, it needs to be clear that you're not copying code from the original. This may be less of an issue with the other free implementations we have now, but a lot of these were clones of proprietary UNIX programs, and then it's really important that you can tell it's not derived from the proprietary version.
- dc-programmer 4y agoGot it, thanks for the explanation and context
- pixelbeat__ 4y agoI did this because it runs significantly faster with relatively extra complexity. It's useful for quickly generating test data etc