5 ms·

The Six Million Dollar LibC (2008)

32 points by arunc 12y ago

vezzy-fnord 12y ago
This was written back in 2008. That said, the future of Android, at least if it is to become a self-hosting development environment, is in musl and Toybox: http://landley.net/toybox/ http://landley.net/toybox/
- joezydeco 12y ago
  And before the NDK. I'm 100% confident termios is in the NDK because I've used it.
snarfy 12y ago
As a user, I find nothing encumbering about the LGPL. I'd argue it's liberating. It might be encumbering for a developer to release a proprietary, for profit version based off the work of others, but for a user it's great.
- mindslight 12y ago
  My first computer running GNU/Linux: Single core, 66MHz, 8MiB RAM. Galaxy S4 i9500: Octa-core, 1200/1600MHz, 2048MiB RAM. That's an advancement of two orders of magnitude. Getting rid of the GPL so the platform could be locked down is basically the only reason for Google/Android's NIH. For all the techie mindshare, "open source" is worth about as much as Microsoft's "shared source" - essentially nothing when it comes to user freedom. Thank goodness for the (thoroughly pwned GPL2) kernel putting slight pressure on manufacturers to be open.
  - sedachv 12y ago
    Android is the best argument for the AGPL.
    - RRRA 12y ago
      Everyone (MacOS X, Android, Jolla, etc.) is building there products, thanks to free Software, (GPL & not GPL) and than adding proprietary wrappers to lock things down & making sure they use non-Copyleft licences for anything else they add as "open"-ed. Free Software is about governance, community, open development, etc: not only the licence! These company are just grabbing what is now infrastructure built by everyone to sell it back to everyone, locked down, and doing code dumping with not-so-open development and communities to trap people who don't get it. So, since the free and open aspect could be built with Public Domain or non-copyleft licences by a community or company doing the right thing (tm), I agree, AGPL "all the things!" is the best way to eliminate part of this problem. (Yes, they can always relicence the code if they own it all, but that's the community & open development part that is harder to evaluate...)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
revelation 12y ago
I think in every modern libc implementation exception handling imposes no extra cost on function calls. In fact, exceptions might well make code faster, as you can take a bunch of error checks out of hot code paths. Pretty much the only downside is the complexity of implementing exceptions for libc maintainers and some extra space in the binary to store information that make the stack unwinding possible, but that data is far, far away from the crucial .text. So exceptions are very expensive when you cause one, but for free or even an improvement when you don't.
Animats 12y ago
If you want to see a tiny version of libc, get the source for the original JOVE editor, Jonathan's Own Version of EMACS, written 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. He was able to cram EMACS into a PDP-11, and to make it fit, had to rewrite all the low-level libraries.
- sedachv 12y ago
  Thanks a lot for that tip! JOVE from 1983 as part of 2.9BSD: http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/29bsd/usr/contrib/jove/ http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/29bsd/usr/contrib/jove/ JOVE circa 1988 in 2.11BSD: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Trees/2.11BSD/usr/src/new/jove/ http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Trees/2.11BSD/usr/src/new...
justincormack 12y ago
Old article, it supports mips, mips64, arm64 now too, and there have been lots of bug fixes, and maybe some additional support. But if you want a BSD licensed libc, Musl is much nicer.

32 points by arunc 12y ago

This was written back in 2008. That said, the future of Android, at least if it is to become a self-hosting development environment, is in musl and Toybox: http://landley.net/toybox/ http://landley.net/toybox/

joezydeco 12y ago
And before the NDK. I'm 100% confident termios is in the NDK because I've used it.

snarfy 12y ago

As a user, I find nothing encumbering about the LGPL. I'd argue it's liberating. It might be encumbering for a developer to release a proprietary, for profit version based off the work of others, but for a user it's great.

mindslight 12y ago
My first computer running GNU/Linux: Single core, 66MHz, 8MiB RAM. Galaxy S4 i9500: Octa-core, 1200/1600MHz, 2048MiB RAM. That's an advancement of two orders of magnitude. Getting rid of the GPL so the platform could be locked down is basically the only reason for Google/Android's NIH. For all the techie mindshare, "open source" is worth about as much as Microsoft's "shared source" - essentially nothing when it comes to user freedom. Thank goodness for the (thoroughly pwned GPL2) kernel putting slight pressure on manufacturers to be open.
- sedachv 12y ago
  Android is the best argument for the AGPL.
  - RRRA 12y ago
    Everyone (MacOS X, Android, Jolla, etc.) is building there products, thanks to free Software, (GPL & not GPL) and than adding proprietary wrappers to lock things down & making sure they use non-Copyleft licences for anything else they add as "open"-ed. Free Software is about governance, community, open development, etc: not only the licence! These company are just grabbing what is now infrastructure built by everyone to sell it back to everyone, locked down, and doing code dumping with not-so-open development and communities to trap people who don't get it. So, since the free and open aspect could be built with Public Domain or non-copyleft licences by a community or company doing the right thing (tm), I agree, AGPL "all the things!" is the best way to eliminate part of this problem. (Yes, they can always relicence the code if they own it all, but that's the community & open development part that is harder to evaluate...)
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

revelation 12y ago

I think in every modern libc implementation exception handling imposes no extra cost on function calls. In fact, exceptions might well make code faster, as you can take a bunch of error checks out of hot code paths. Pretty much the only downside is the complexity of implementing exceptions for libc maintainers and some extra space in the binary to store information that make the stack unwinding possible, but that data is far, far away from the crucial .text. So exceptions are very expensive when you cause one, but for free or even an improvement when you don't.

Animats 12y ago

If you want to see a tiny version of libc, get the source for the original JOVE editor, Jonathan's Own Version of EMACS, written 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School. He was able to cram EMACS into a PDP-11, and to make it fit, had to rewrite all the low-level libraries.

sedachv 12y ago
Thanks a lot for that tip! JOVE from 1983 as part of 2.9BSD: http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/29bsd/usr/contrib/jove/ http://www.retro11.de/ouxr/29bsd/usr/contrib/jove/ JOVE circa 1988 in 2.11BSD: http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Trees/2.11BSD/usr/src/new/jove/ http://www.tuhs.org/Archive/PDP-11/Trees/2.11BSD/usr/src/new...

justincormack 12y ago

Old article, it supports mips, mips64, arm64 now too, and there have been lots of bug fixes, and maybe some additional support. But if you want a BSD licensed libc, Musl is much nicer.