Hi,
This is just a badly written letter that in confessing it's own lack of
ideas tries to tell everyone else that their lack of ideas should hit them
like the lightning.
But please read on, because if you ignore what is said herein, the path is
going down-down-down.
A first look on the hurd-code reveals some not-so-well-hidden facts.
Sometimes functions are placed inside other functions and sometimes they
aren't. SOme functions take an absurd number of arguments and some doesn't.
Some of the arguments' types are also typedefed away, away. All in all, it
looks like a rewrite in c++ or objective-c (a language ooohhh... so
ignored, but still wonderful) is what the programmers always wanted.
Apparently a plan for a design is missing. Yes there is some documents and
yes the main idea is there: but, the fact is: the hurd is slow, the way
everything is right now, is wrong. Libraries are confusing and there
sometimes seem to be a hard-to-get or no logic in the design of the
interfaces.
All in all, referring to the design, I think new design-goals are
inevitable. When one looks at the linux kernel and how fast one can
understand how almost everything hangs together, there is a great gap to
hurd. Something must be done here, because otherwise almost no people will
be able to sit down and hack on it. One must understand that the average
hurd-hacker maybe has some two days to use and then must go back to work
and if one needs one day to understand the most basic things then it is
easy to see how screwed up it is.
I think an object-oriented language would be a solution to some of this
matter, (as well as either the use of hungerian notation (Oops. microsoft
is coming to get us) or the eradicatment of typedefs)
This is however not just an attack on coding-conventions but also on the
whole design. What library here, what argument there and what function and
where. It is just to complicated. A complex interface is _never_ good.
Especially when people doesn't get anything, but the experience. ANd the
experience of trying to understand the inconsistent is apart from some art,
not very cool.
My next point is maybe even more important, where are it all heading. What
is the goal of the project. To demolish bugs. Naahhh... Rather it should be
to create something new. But how and with what means. I don't know much
here... Actually I know nothing. But I think this issue is to or should be
solved soon.
The only thing I can't accept is this: fix the bugs.
Sure that is an important step, but what says that development can't go on
in parallell? There is a need for new ideas and that fast.
If the project falls down into fixing bugs for years and years, nothing
else will happen and the idea that once was good will slowly go down in a
spiral through the nine parts of hell :)
To summarize this letter: get a design, get a goal and then hopefully get
programmers.
sorry if I'm a moron or attacked someone's coding convention or made some
insult or just seem to have missed the point. The only thing I can comment
to that kind of critiscism is: please don't ignore the message of this
letter just because I'm an idiot.
