4 ms·

In case of glibc I think what you said is orthogonal to its bloat. Yes, it has complex implementations but since they are for a good reason I'd hardly call them

In case of glibc I think what you said is orthogonal to its bloat. Yes, it has complex implementations but since they are for a good reason I'd hardly call them bloat. Independently from that glibc implements a lot of stuff that could be considered bloat: - Extensive internationalization support - Extensive backward compatibility - Support for numerous architectures and platforms - Comprehensive implementations of optional standards

kstrauser 1y ago
Ok, fair points, although internationalization seems like a reasonable thing to include at first glance. Is there a fork of glibc that strips ancient or bizarre platforms?
- dima55 1y ago
  What problem are you trying to solve? glibc works just fine for most use cases. If you have some niche requirements, you have alternative libraries you can use (listed in the article). Forking glibc in the way you describe is literally pointless
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Nothing really. I was just curious and this isn’t something I know much about, but would like to learn more of.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
  It's called glibc. Essentially all that "bloat" is conditionally compiled, if your target isn't an ancient or bizarre platform it won't get included in the runtime.
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    That’s mostly true, but not quite. For instance, suppose you aim to support all of 32/64-bit and little/big-endian. You’ll likely end up factoring straightforward math operations out into standalone functions. Granted, those will probably get inlined, but it may mean your structure is more abstracted than it would be otherwise. Just supporting the options has implications. That’s not the strongest example. I just meant it to be illustrative of the idea.
    - jcranmer 1y ago
      The way glibc's source works (for something like math functions) is that essentially every function is implemented in its own file, and various config knobs can provide extra directories to compile and provide function definitions. This can make actually finding the implementation that's going to be used difficult, since a naive search for the function name can turn up like 20 different function definitions, and working out which one is actually in play can be difficult (especially since it's more than just the architecture name). Math functions aren't going to be strongly impacted by diverse hardware support. In practice, you largely care about 32-bit and 64-bit IEEE 754 types, which means your macros to decompose floating-point types to their constituent sign/exponent/significand fields are already going to be pretty portable even across different endianness (just bitcast to a uint32_t/uint64_t, and all of the shift logic will remain the same). And there's not much reason to vary the implementation except to take advantage of hardware instructions that implement the math functions directly... which are generally better handled by the compiler anyways.
      - saagarjha 1y ago
        People don't typically implement math functions by pulling bits out of a reinterpreted floating point number. If you rely on the compiler, you get whatever it decides for you, which might be something dumb like float80.
- int_19h 1y ago
  "Internationalization" is a very broad item that can include e.g. support for non-UTF-8 locales, which is something few Linux distros need today.

kstrauser 1y ago

Ok, fair points, although internationalization seems like a reasonable thing to include at first glance. Is there a fork of glibc that strips ancient or bizarre platforms?

dima55 1y ago
What problem are you trying to solve? glibc works just fine for most use cases. If you have some niche requirements, you have alternative libraries you can use (listed in the article). Forking glibc in the way you describe is literally pointless
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Nothing really. I was just curious and this isn’t something I know much about, but would like to learn more of.
SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
It's called glibc. Essentially all that "bloat" is conditionally compiled, if your target isn't an ancient or bizarre platform it won't get included in the runtime.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  That’s mostly true, but not quite. For instance, suppose you aim to support all of 32/64-bit and little/big-endian. You’ll likely end up factoring straightforward math operations out into standalone functions. Granted, those will probably get inlined, but it may mean your structure is more abstracted than it would be otherwise. Just supporting the options has implications. That’s not the strongest example. I just meant it to be illustrative of the idea.
  - jcranmer 1y ago
    The way glibc's source works (for something like math functions) is that essentially every function is implemented in its own file, and various config knobs can provide extra directories to compile and provide function definitions. This can make actually finding the implementation that's going to be used difficult, since a naive search for the function name can turn up like 20 different function definitions, and working out which one is actually in play can be difficult (especially since it's more than just the architecture name). Math functions aren't going to be strongly impacted by diverse hardware support. In practice, you largely care about 32-bit and 64-bit IEEE 754 types, which means your macros to decompose floating-point types to their constituent sign/exponent/significand fields are already going to be pretty portable even across different endianness (just bitcast to a uint32_t/uint64_t, and all of the shift logic will remain the same). And there's not much reason to vary the implementation except to take advantage of hardware instructions that implement the math functions directly... which are generally better handled by the compiler anyways.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      People don't typically implement math functions by pulling bits out of a reinterpreted floating point number. If you rely on the compiler, you get whatever it decides for you, which might be something dumb like float80.
int_19h 1y ago
"Internationalization" is a very broad item that can include e.g. support for non-UTF-8 locales, which is something few Linux distros need today.