Linus Rants About C Programming Semantics (iu.edu)

jones_supa writes: "Christ people. This is just sh*t," begins Linus Torvalds in his message on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Torvalds is grumpy because some new code added to the IPv6 subsystem has created conflicts. "The conflict I get is due to stupid new gcc header file crap," he writes. "But what makes me upset is that the crap is for completely bogus reasons." The new improved code uses fancy stuff that wants magical built-in compiler support and has silly wrapper functions for when it doesn't exist. Linus provides an alternative that contains a single and understandable conditional, which looks cleaner and generates better code.

Comments

Re: Not saying I disagree with Torvalds

[AmiMoJo]

"It's literally one punch in the balls out of thousands of friendly hand-shakes per year."

Yeah, I wouldn't submit patches to him either. The GP is right, if your boss came in to the office and started ranting about a couple of admittedly bad lines in your code in front of everyone now and then, he would be fired pretty quickly. People say Linus needs to be like that when controlling a large open source project like the Linux kernel, but plenty of other large open source projects get by without public shaming rants. Major sub-systems in Linux, for example.