Re: More benchmark bullshit, and Linux luser mating calls... (was Re: Linux betas NT in TPC testing, running Oracle8

On Fri, 23 Apr 1999 16:54:19 -0400,
Joshua Schaeffer <electric_ninja_at_email.msn.com> wrote:
>>Oh, linux has _plenty_ of flaws, just fewer than WindowsNT for example.
>
>
>Would you care to elaborate? And be specific.

I can at least state that Linux has a nasty flaw -- but it's mostly an internal one, and may not have much applicability (it is a big C program, after all).

It uses pointers in its structures. Naughty naughty! :-)

(I've been corrupted by a famous person who gives out C++ lectures around here whose name completely escapes me at the moment (grr) -- "Pointers are bad". Mind you, it's not clear whether we want to have C++ and STL [*] in the Linux kernel... :-) )

If this is the worst flaw of Linux, then I for one am happy with it. I suspect there are performance issues in ext2fs as well, but it's not clear that I'd want to go to NTFS, a journaled file system, or something like HPFS (Apple's system) just because of that.

(The only other beef I personally have with Linux is that the code is sometimes ungrokkable. But then, I haven't grokked it enough, and at least I can try to grok it -- can I grok NT? Win95? Even DOS? :-) (Freedos doesn't count! :-) ) )

[*] Standard Template Library. A very interesting series of routines --

    mostly inline -- that allows for independence of many algorithms from     their data structures (it's as easy to walk a list as a hash table,     a vector, or a red-black tree).