Re: Low Latency Patch

[Robert Dinse]

On Sat, 1 Jul 2000, Michael Borrelli wrote:
> 
> I think that the fact that Linux does accept so much input from the
> user/hacker communities is the reason it has gone on so well.

     I'm not arguing that that is not the case, in fact I know this is
absolutely true.  I am concerned that it remain true.  Khimenko Victor and
Yoann Vandoorselaere seem to be arguing that it should not be. 

> Why not try to make your code 'prettier' and then resubmit it?  No sense
> yelling at others for saying they don't like the way it looks.  If it
> works well, fix the looks so that it is 1) neat 2) maintainable.
> 
> -mb

     If it were my code, and there were an obvious way to achieve the
functionality and meet those objectives, I would do so. 

     It's not my code but I think the functionality Mingo created is
worthwhile.  I don't have the knowledge of the kernel internals, the time, a
machine I can boot 200 times a day and do kernel profiling on, etc, to develope
code with equivalent functionality that is "prettier", "neat", and
"maintainable".

     In all likelihood my idea of pretty, neat, and maintainable would differ
from yours, and Linus, and without a doubt Khimenko Victor and Yoann
Vandoorselaere.

     Personally, in terms of asthetics; I think Kernighan and Ritchie had the
right idea in their original implimentation of C.  I really rather dislike what
GNU and ANSI has done to it.  It's become too full of fluff and too abstracted
from the machine.  But again that's just me. 

     Given a choice between pretty or functional, I tend to opt for the latter. 
But that's just me.  I think the user community doesn't care what it looks
like, they just want it to work, they want and need the functionality.  I
understand that maintainability is important to preserving functionality; I'm a
little at a loss as to how additional schedualing points significantly impacts
maintainability.