One thing I find interesting, is that he makes a case for optimizing something without providing any profiling data. As others have pointed out, he's talking ab

One thing I find interesting, is that he makes a case for optimizing something without providing any profiling data. As others have pointed out, he's talking about doing away with something that offers flexibility, and doing away with it might lead to security problems, while not offering any good reason why it is necessary. The least he could do is profile a few representative programs (say, Firefox and Apache) to show that this is a real hot spot that needs attention. That's why we have things like sysprof and valgrind/cachegrind.