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Re: On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

by Douglas McIlroy

I just revisited this ironic echo of Mies van der Rohe's aphorism, "Less is more". % less --help | wc 298 Last time I looked, the line count was about 220. Bloat is self-catalyzing. What prompted me to look was another disheartening discovery. The "small special tool" Gnu diff has a 95-page manual! And it doesn't cover the option I was looking up (-h). To be fair, the manual includes related programs like diff3(1), sdiff(1) and patch(1), but the original manual for each fit on one page. Doug

1 year, 1 month

The 'usage: ...' message. (Was: On Bloat...)

by Douglas McIlroy

> was ‘usage: ...’ adopted from an earlier system? "Usage" was one of those lovely ideas, one exposure to which flips its status from unknown to eternal truth. I am sure my first exposure was on Unix, but I don't remember when. Perhaps because it radically departs from Ken's "?" in qed/ed, I have subconsciously attributed it to Dennis. The genius of "usage" and "?" is that they don't attempt to tell one what's wrong. Most diagnostics cite a rule or hidden limit that's been violated or describe the mistake (e.g. "missing semicolon") , sometimes raising more questions than they answer. Another non-descriptive style of error message that I admired was that of Berkeley Pascal's syntax diagnostics. When the LR parser could not proceed, it reported where, and automatically provided a sample token that would allow the parsing to progress. I found this uniform convention to be at least as informative as distinct hand-crafted messages, which almost by definition can't foresee every contingency. Alas, this elegant scheme seems not to have inspired imitators. Doug

1 year, 1 month

If forking is bad, how about buffering?

by Douglas McIlroy

So fork() is a significant nuisance. How about the far more ubiquitous problem of IO buffering? On Sun, May 12, 2024 at 12:34:20PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote: > But it does come down to the same argument as > https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.… The Microsoft manifesto says that fork() is an evil hack. One of the cited evils is that one must remember to flush output buffers before forking, for fear it will be emitted twice. But buffering is the culprit, not the victim. Output buffers must be flushed for many other reasons: to avoid deadlock; to force prompt delivery of urgent output; to keep output from being lost in case of a subsequent failure. Input buffers can also steal data by reading ahead into stuff that should go to another consumer. In all these cases buffering can break compositionality. Yet the manifesto blames an instance of the hazard on fork()! To assure compositionality, one must flush output buffers at every possible point where an unknown downstream consumer might correctly act on the received data with observable results. And input buffering must never ingest data that the program will not eventually use. These are tough criteria to meet in general without sacrificing buffering. The advent of pipes vividly exposed the non-compositionality of output buffering. Interactive pipelines froze when users could not provide input that would force stuff to be flushed until the input was informed by that very stuff. This phenomenon motivated cat -u, and stdio's convention of line buffering for stdout. The premier example of input buffering eating other programs' data was mitigated by "here documents" in the Bourne shell. These precautions are mere fig leaves that conceal important special cases. The underlying evil of buffered IO still lurks. The justification is that it's necessary to match the characteristics of IO devices and to minimize system-call overhead. The former necessity requires the attention of hardware designers, but the latter is in the hands of programmers. What can be done to mitigate the pain of border-crossing into the kernel? L4 and its ilk have taken a whack. An even more radical approach might flow from the "whitepaper" at www.codevalley.com. In any even the abolition of buffering is a grand challenge. Doug

1 year, 1 month

Re: Be there a "remote diff" utility?

by Douglas McIlroy

With the disclaimer that I have never used it, I note that FUSE/sshfs allows one to mount remote file systems. Doug

1 year, 1 month

Re: [COFF] Re: On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

by Adam Thornton

On Sat, May 11, 2024 at 2:35 PM Theodore Ts'o <tytso(a)mit.edu> wrote: > > I bet most of the young'uns would not be trying to do this as a shell > script, but using the Cloud SDK with perl or python or Go, which is > *way* more bloaty than using /bin/sh. > > So while some of us old farts might be bemoaning the death of the Unix > philosophy, perhaps part of the reality is that the Unix philosophy > were ideal for a simpler time, but might not be as good of a fit > today I'm finding myself in agreement. I might well do this with jq, but as you point out, you're using the jq DSL pretty extensively to pull out the fields. On the other hand, I don't think that's very different than piping stuff through awk, and I don't think anyone feels like _that_ would be cheating. And jq -L is pretty much equivalent to awk -F, which is how I would do this in practice, rather than trying to inline the whole jq bit. But it does come down to the same argument as https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prod/2019/04/fork-hotos19.… And it is true that while fork() is a great model for single-threaded pipeline-looking tasks, it's not really what you want for an interactive multithreaded application on your phone's GUI. Oddly, I'd have a slightly different reason for reaching for Python (which is probably how I'd do this anyway), and that's the batteries-included bit. If I write in Python, I've got the gcloud api available as a Python module, and I've got a JSON parser also available as a Python module (but I bet all the JSON unmarshalling is already handled in the gcloud library), and I don't have to context-switch to the same degree that I would if I were stringing it together in the shell. Instead of "make an HTTP request to get JSON text back, then parse that with repeated calls to jq", I'd just get an object back from the instance fetch request, pick out the fields I wanted, and I'd be done. I'm afraid only old farts write anything in Perl anymore. The kids just mutter "OK, Boomer" when you try to tell them how much better CPAN was than PyPi. And it sure feels like all the cool kids have abandoned Go for Rust, although Go would be a perfectly reasonable choice for this task as well (and would look a lot like Python: get an object back, pick off the useful fields). Adam

1 year, 1 month

nl section delimiters

by Douglas McIlroy

> But it misses the coolness of the empty true(1). Too cool. With an empty true(1), execl("true", "true", 0) is out in the cold. Doug

1 year, 1 month

Re: On the uniqueness of DMR's C compiler

by Douglas McIlroy

There was nothing unique about the size or the object code of Dennis's C compiler. In the 1960s, Digitek had a thriving business of making Fortran compilers for all manner of machines. To optimize space usage, the compilers' internal memory model comprised variable-size movable tables, called "rolls". To exploit this non-native architecture, the compilers themselves were interpreted, although they generated native code. Bob McClure tells me he used one on an SDS910 that had 8K 16-bit words. Dennis was one-up on Digitek in having a self-maintaining compiler. Thus, when he implemented an optimization, the source would grow, but the compiler binary might even shrink thanks to self-application. Doug

1 year, 1 month

nl section delimiters

by David Arnold

nl(1) uses the notable character sequences “\:\:\:”, “\:\:”, and “\:” to delimit header, body, and trailer sections within its input. I wondered if anyone was able to shed light on the reason those were adopted as the defaults? I would have expected perhaps something compatible with *roff (like, .\” something). FreeBSD claims nl first appeared in System III (although it previously claimed SVR2), but I haven’t dug into the implementation any further. Thanks in advance, d

1 year, 1 month

Re: On the uniqueness of DMR's C compiler

by Paul McJones

> On Thu, 9 May 2024 22:40:28 +0200, Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl <mailto:pnr@planet.nl>> wrote: > > .... Digging into this more led me to a 1970 report "Programming Languages and their Compilers, Preliminary Notes” by John Cocke and J.T. Schwartz: > https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/paper/Bright-FORTRANC… Actually, the link is here: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/FORTRAN/CockeSchwartz_ProgLan… And more about Jack Schwartz is here: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/SETL/index.html#Precursors Paul

1 year, 1 month

On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools

by Clem Cole

While the idea of small tools that do one job well is the core tenant of what I think of as the UNIX philosophy, this goes a bit beyond UNIX, so I have moved this discussion to COFF and BCCing TUHS for now. The key is that not all "bloat" is the same (really)—or maybe one person's bloat is another person's preference. That said, NIH leads to pure bloat with little to recommend it, while multiple offerings are a choice. Maybe the difference between the two may be one person's view over another. On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 6:08 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote: > Didn't recognize the command, looked it up. Sigh. > Like Rob -- this was a new one for me, too. I looked, and it is on the SYS3 tape; see: https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/man/man1/nl.1 > pr -tn <file> > > seems sufficient for me, but then that raises the question of your > question. > Agreed, that has been burned into the ROMs in my fingers since the mid-1970s 😀 BTW: SYS3 has pr(1) with both switches too (more in a minute) > I've been developing a theory about how the existence of something leads > to things being added to it that you didn't need at all and only thought of > when the original thing was created. > That is a good point, and I generally agree with you. > Bloat by example, if you will. I suspect it will not be a popular theory, > however accurately it may describe the technological world. > Of course, sometimes the new features >>are<< easier (more natural *for some people*). And herein lies the core problem. The bloat is often repetitive, and I suggest that it is often implemented in the wrong place - and usually for the wrong reasons. Bloat comes about because somebody thinks they need some feature and probably doesn't understand that it is already there or how they can use it. But they do know about it, their tool must be set up to exploit it - so they do not need to reinvent it. GUI-based tools are notorious for this failure. Everyone seems to have a built-in (unique) editor, or a private way to set up configuration options et al. But ... that walled garden is comfortable for many users and >>can be<< useful sometimes. Long ago, UNIX programmers learned that looking for $EDITOR in the environment was way better than creating one. Configuration was as ASCII text, stored in /etc for system-wide and dot files in the home for users. But it also means the >>output<< of each tool needs to be usable by each other [*i.e.*, docx or xlx files are a no-no). For example, for many things on my Mac, I do use the GUI-based tools -- there is no doubt they are better integrated with the core Mac system >>for some tasks.<< But only if I obey a set of rules Apple decrees. For instance, this email read is easier much of the time than MH (or the HM front end, for that matter), which I used for probably 25-30 years. But on my Mac, I always have 4 or 5 iterm2(1) open running zsh(1) these days. And, much of my typing (and everything I do as a programmer) is done in the shell (including a simple text editor, not an 'IDE'). People who love IDEs swear by them -- I'm just not impressed - there is nothing they do for me that makes it easier, and I have learned yet another scheme. That said, sadly, Apple is forcing me to learn yet another debugger since none of the traditional UNIX-based ones still work on the M1-based systems. But at least LLDB is in the same key as sdb/dbx/gdb *et al*., so it is a PITA but not a huge thing as, in the end, LLDB is still based on the UNIX idea of a single well-designed and specific to the task tool, to do each job and can work with each other. FWIW: I was recently a tad gob-smacked by the core idea of UNIX and its tools, which I have taken for a fact since the 1970s. It turns out that I've been helping with the PiDP-10 users (all of the PiDPs are cool, BTW). Before I saw UNIX, I was paid to program a PDP-10. In fact, my first UNIX job was helping move programs from the 10 to the UNIX. Thus ... I had been thinking that doing a little PDP-10 hacking shouldn't be too hard to dust off some of that old knowledge. While some of it has, of course, come back. But daily, I am discovering small things that are so natural with a few simple tools can be hard on those systems. I am realizing (rediscovering) that the "build it into my tool" was the norm in those days. So instead of a pr(1) command, there was a tool that created output to the lineprinter. You give it a file, and it is its job to figure out what to do with it, so it has its set of features (switches) - so "bloat" is that each tool (like many current GUI tools) has private ways of doing things. If the maker of tool X decided to support some idea, they would do it like tool Y. The problem, of course, was that tools X and Y had to 'know about' each type of file (in IBM terms, use its "access method"). Yes, the engineers at DEC, in their wisdom, tried to "standardize" those access methods/switches/features >>if you implemented them<< -- but they are not all there. This leads me back to the question Rob raises. Years ago, I got into an argument with Dave Cutler RE: UNIX *vs.* VMS. Dave's #1 complaint about UNIX in those days was that it was not "standardized." Every program was different, and more to Dave's point, there was no attempt to make switches or errors the same [getopt(3) had been introduced but was not being used by most applications). He hated that tar/tp used "keys" and tools like cpio used switches. Dave hated that I/O was so simple - in his world all user programs should use his RMS access method of course [1]. VMS, TOPS, *etc.*, tried to maintain a system-wide error scheme, and users could look things like errors up in a system DB by error number, *etc*. Simply put, VMS is very "top-down." My point with Dave was that by being "bottom-up," the best ideas in UNIX were able to rise. And yes, it did mean some rough edges and repeated implementations of the same idea. But UNIX offered a choice, and while Rob and I like and find: pr -tn perfectly acceptable thank you, clearly someone else desired the features that nl provides. The folks that put together System 3 offer both solutions and let the user choose. This, of course, comes as bloat, but maybe that is a type of bloat so bad? My own thinking is this - get things down to the basics and simplest privatives and then build back up. It's okay to offer choices, as long as the foundation is simple and clean. To me, bloat becomes an issue when you do the same thing over and over again, particularly because you can not utilize what is there already, the worst example is NIH - which happens way more than it should. I think the kind of bloat that GUI tools and TOPS et al. created forces recreation, not reuse. But offering choice and the expense of multiple tools that do the same things strikes me as reasonable/probably a good thing. 1.] BTW: One of my favorite DEC stories WRT to VMS engineering has to do with the RMS I/O system. Supporting C using VMS was a bit of PITA. Eventually, the VMS engineers added Stream I/O - which simplified the C runtime, but it was also made available for all technical languages. Fairly soon after it was released, the DEC Marketing folks discovered almost all new programs, regardless of language, had started to use Stream I/O and many older programs were being rewritten by customers to use it. In fact, inside of DEC itself, the languages group eventually rewrote things like the FTN runtime to use streams, making it much smaller/easier to maintain. My line in the old days: "It's not so bad that ever I/O has offer 1000 options, it's that Dave to check each one for every I/O. It's a classic example of how you can easily build RMS I/O out of stream-based I/O, but the other way around is much harder. My point here is to *use the right primitives*. RMS may have made it easier to build RDB, but it impeded everything else.

1 year, 1 month

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