23 ms·
The discouraging of everybody who wants to provide an alternative only locks us in to supershitty software that got there first. Worst is Better reigns. I mean
by kryptiskt 13y ago
The discouraging of everybody who wants to provide an alternative only locks us in to supershitty software that got there first. Worst is Better reigns.
I mean, there is an extremely small chance that anybody will adopt your library if it is unquestionably better than the dominant alternative. We don't actually need to discourage people, we need to do everything to encourage them. Sure, 99 of 100 will be no better than our present crap. What does it matter? Few will adopt it anyway. The tragedy is that the better alternatives will probably meet the same fate.
- vidarh 13y ago"nobody" is not an absolute here. It's a reminder that the vast majority of people who get the idea to write their own memory allocator, garbage collection or filesystem will do an even worse job at it than the people who implemented the ones we typically use did, but it will end up going mostly unnoticed and possibly make it into some critical piece of software.
- pron 13y agoThe idea is to leave each component to the experts. If you're a concurrency/memory expert, then write a malloc library. If you're a cryptography expert, write your crypto code and use someone else's malloc.