10mo ago

The Madness behind the Linux Source Code Comments - YouTube

linuxmemes @lemmy.world

hmmm @sh.itjust.works

5mo ago

The Madness behind the Linux Source Code Comments

15 comments

Back in the 90’s before the days of Windows 3.0 I had to debug a memory manager written by a brilliant but somewhat odd guy. Among other thing I stumbled across:
A temporary variable called “handy” because it was useful in a number of situations.
Another one called son_of_handy, used in conjunction with handy.
Blocks of memory were referred to as cookies.
Cookies had a flag called shit_cookie_corrupt that would get set if the block of memory was suspected of being corrupt.
Each time a cookie was found to be corrupt then the function OhShit() was called.
If too many cookies were corrupt then the function OhShitOhShitOhShit() was called, which would terminate everything.
Funny :)
Hard to be sane with so many broken hardware implementations... 😅
Cudos for the Linux developers!
We're talking about a kernel whose user-visible error messages have historically included things like "lp0 on fire" . . .
- The 'printer of fire' error used to be a legitimate and important concern. Ye olde printers really could light their paper on fire under certain circumstances and they would typically be huge devices in dedicated rooms rather than something right next to your system. Letting people know to check on it when specific things went wrong probably saved a few buildings from burning down with people in them.
  
  It was a legitimate but extremely rare concern with some early printers, yes (Wikipedia points out a particular early laser model from Xerox, plus an experimental machine from 1959, as printers that have legit caught on fire, but also points out that there is no known report of one of the old industrial-sized line or drum printers ever catching fire from friction despite it being a hypothesized failure mode). Thing is, those printers were, I believe, all obsolete by the time the Linux kernel was written. So the "on fire" error message is not likely to have been congruent with reality for any machine actually running Linux.
The stuff me and my friends have written in private code bases we worked on before... Now those were some words we used. could never make anything like that public these days, too much softies would go crazy because of it.
- Oh please. This comment has the same energy as Dave Chappelle doing a whole Netflix special about how he's been cancelled.
  
  It reads to me like someone trying to build a persona that Elon would like.
  
  no? It was just normal common stuff... Pretending like standards Haven't changed, even if just for code comments, is just plain dumb.
- You are so revolutionary. Much edgy, very wow.
  
  There's literally nothing edgy about it. Standards change, that's not edgy.
- // retarded shit, remove on next update
  
  One of the ones we had to take out. I'm still mad because it wasn't even that bad. It was a massive really long function that should have been refectored but kept getting put off. The comment was along the lines of
  // TODO: take this fat bitch to the gym later.
  Had to get removed because insensitive, well the function finally got refactored at least lol.

15 comments