3 ms·

They were trying to save storage space and build times as the source grew in size.

• parasti 3y ago
  Any truth to this? Somebody must have ran a benchmark at least?
  • water-your-self 3y ago
    A parse of the topic on the style guide doesnt suggest anything of the sort https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h...
  • benj111 3y ago
    I hope the parent was being humourous. 1 tab is 1 byte, 4 spaces is 4 bytes, so it doesn't actually work anyway. And you can't rely on it being multiples of 4 anyway, so you'd have to iterate and check the bytes to check they are actually spaces. So no, it's be slower, but not enough to matter. Edit: or is the parent proposing the opposite? I sti hope they're being humourous as it still doesn't really matter
    • sedatk 3y ago
      No, that was my actual theory for what happened, but apparently not true at all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37104012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37104012
  • sedatk 3y ago
    I actually went ahead and asked Linus Torvalds himself. He said he'd never use spaces, and always used tabs from the get go. So, my theory fails :) > What? No. > It always used tabs. > And by "always used tabs" I mean "mistakes probably happened, and there may be spaces in some places", but afaik I've always used hard-tabs as the normal indentation. > If you see something else, you probably have some archive that has been reformatted.