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The unfortunate excerpts from this post that stood out for me: > Without access to a lot of source code I can’t tell exactly what is going on, but... > Until

The unfortunate excerpts from this post that stood out for me: > Without access to a lot of source code I can’t tell exactly what is going on, but... > Until Microsoft fixes their compiler to not load their web browser it seems impossible to avoid this problem when doing lots of parallel builds. In my past life developing applications and services on Windows, this scenario was too common — something is broken, you can't quite tell why because you don't have the source, and you can't do anything but wait for it to be fixed or find some hacky workarounds (which is tougher to do without the source). This has been the real win on switching to an open source stack for me: you can take your tools apart, look inside them, and fix any issues. I know Microsoft has come further in this in the past few years, but it still sucks to be stuck in that kind of situation.

duncan_bayne 13y ago
Very true. Being able to fix tools and libraries is such a change. I'll never go back to Microsoft (or any other closed-source, proprietary) development if I can help it.
- ksk 13y ago
  May I ask what kind of F/OSS software bugs have you found and fixed (as a user) which you were unable to with proprietary software? I don't need a list, I want to know more about the description of the bug.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - duncan_bayne 13y ago
    This is the specific example that happened not long after I abandoned Windows development altogether (I'd been using RoR since 2007, and Linux since 1995, but hadn't gone full time with both except through my own company): https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/pull/554 https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/pull/554 Gave me the warm fuzzies, even though I broke everything temporarily :)
  - kentonv 13y ago
    My story: MongoDB by default pre-allocates hundreds of MB for its databases, but I had a situation where I was instantiating lots and lots of small databases that only needed to hold a kB or two of data each. Command-line flags could only get the prealloc down to 32-ish MB. By twiddling some constants in the Mongo source code I got it down to the few kB I wanted. Granted, MongoDB is not meant to be used for small databases (the name comes from hu-mongo-us), but the app I was using was written against Mongo and changing that would have been a whole lot harder than modifying some constants. Changes here, BTW: https://github.com/kentonv/mongo/commit/14f391a000134e5d9d65bb14a6110e5a5b0be61d https://github.com/kentonv/mongo/commit/14f391a000134e5d9d65...
NigelTufnel 13y ago
Were it GCC instead of VC++ that wouldn't change much for a lot of people. Fixing bugs in a program with 7 million lines of code is not easy. Fixing bugs in GCC for an unitiated person is probably super hard.
- kentonv 13y ago
  > Fixing bugs in a program with 7 million lines of code is not easy. It's not like you have to read all 7 million lines of code. The author of the article already has a stack trace; all he'd need to do is skim the functions along that trace. In this case it sounds highly likely that the fix is to comment out some code somewhere that is initializing a resource that isn't actually needed. Frankly it sounds pretty easy.

duncan_bayne 13y ago

Very true. Being able to fix tools and libraries is such a change. I'll never go back to Microsoft (or any other closed-source, proprietary) development if I can help it.

ksk 13y ago
May I ask what kind of F/OSS software bugs have you found and fixed (as a user) which you were unable to with proprietary software? I don't need a list, I want to know more about the description of the bug.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- duncan_bayne 13y ago
  This is the specific example that happened not long after I abandoned Windows development altogether (I'd been using RoR since 2007, and Linux since 1995, but hadn't gone full time with both except through my own company): https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/pull/554 https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/pull/554 Gave me the warm fuzzies, even though I broke everything temporarily :)
- kentonv 13y ago
  My story: MongoDB by default pre-allocates hundreds of MB for its databases, but I had a situation where I was instantiating lots and lots of small databases that only needed to hold a kB or two of data each. Command-line flags could only get the prealloc down to 32-ish MB. By twiddling some constants in the Mongo source code I got it down to the few kB I wanted. Granted, MongoDB is not meant to be used for small databases (the name comes from hu-mongo-us), but the app I was using was written against Mongo and changing that would have been a whole lot harder than modifying some constants. Changes here, BTW: https://github.com/kentonv/mongo/commit/14f391a000134e5d9d65bb14a6110e5a5b0be61d https://github.com/kentonv/mongo/commit/14f391a000134e5d9d65...

NigelTufnel 13y ago

Were it GCC instead of VC++ that wouldn't change much for a lot of people. Fixing bugs in a program with 7 million lines of code is not easy. Fixing bugs in GCC for an unitiated person is probably super hard.

kentonv 13y ago
> Fixing bugs in a program with 7 million lines of code is not easy. It's not like you have to read all 7 million lines of code. The author of the article already has a stack trace; all he'd need to do is skim the functions along that trace. In this case it sounds highly likely that the fix is to comment out some code somewhere that is initializing a resource that isn't actually needed. Frankly it sounds pretty easy.