Linus Torvalds Will Answer Your Questions

Linus Torvalds was (and still is) the primary force behind the development of the Linux kernel, and since you are reading Slashdot, you already knew that. Mr. Torvalds has agreed to answer any questions you may have about the direction of software, his thoughts on politics, winning the Millenial Technology Prize, or anything else. Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please keep them to one per post. We'll send the best to Linus, and post his answers when we get them back. Remember to keep an eye out for the rest of our upcoming special interviews this month.

Comments

The obvious question: the binary blobs in linux

[Anonymous Coward]

What is his stance on the subject today and why did he allow them in the first place? When will he kick them out?

Re:Your 2007 Comments on C++

[Kjella]

You want Linus to do a book project?

Re:Frustrations

[Alter_3d]

What frustrates you most in the GNU/Linux ecosystem?

I can answer that for him.

People who insist on using the name GNU/Linux
Naming controversy wars!!

Re:Your 2007 Comments on C++

[Anonymous Coward]

This is remarkably stupid. Your argument about return values is literally the same thing in C. Your program is just as prone to crash if you return garbage instead of a char pointer. You just hid that by using an int instead, which could also crash if you use the int somewhere where its validity is important. C or C++, you should just use -Wall -Wfatal-errors.

For the record, Linus was obviously performing his usual exaggeration routine to get his point across, just like "NVIDIA... Fuck you" and several other remarks that make him notorious.

Re:Your 2007 Comments on C++

[betterunixthanunix]

Your program is just as prone to crash if you return garbage instead of a char pointer

Unless you discard the return value. For example:

char * f(void){
if(some_condition) return "Some string";
}

/* ... */
if(some_condition) printf("%s\n", f());
else f();

Sure, this is horrible code, but it won't crash. The equivalent C++ code will crash whenever some_condition is false, because it still expects to have an object to destroy.

you should just use -Wall -Wfatal-errors.

1. If everyone should use that, then those should be in the standard.
2. That is "folklore" -- it is not standardized, it is just something every C++ programmer is "supposed to know."