64-bit ARM Linux Kernel Against CPU-Specific Optimizations: "Pretty Unmaintainable"

[Volta]

I dispute that it's even easy to use. Have you seen what goes into doing a proper "Before I do this heavy work I need to know what filename to open for writing, I want to bail out early with an error message if the parent directory isn't writable" check? On POSIX platforms, it's a simple use of the faccess(2) libc function. On Windows, it's this huge, complex hunk of code to query Windows's massively overcomplicated permissions model which just gets copied and ported whenever a new language needs a portable access(2) wrapper.

Here's what it looks like when unrolled into Rust code. Compare to the POSIX counterpart just above it in the other conditional compilation block.

Well, the only experience I had with win32 api was displaying simple graphics. I thought it was equally simple in other respects. This does not change the fact that win32 api is terrible, broken by design POS (not my conclusion, but a fact from reliable sources). Just like windows permissions model. After getting used to SDL, I will never have to look at win32 again.

[ssokolow]

Well, the only experience I had with win32 api was displaying simple graphics. I thought it was equally simple in other respects. This does not change the fact that win32 api is terrible, broken by design POS (not my conclusion, but a fact from reliable sources). Just like windows permissions model. After getting used to SDL, I will never have to look at win32 again.

Makes sense. POSIX is much simpler than Win32, but, from what little reading I've done for Win16 hobby programming and what little poking at Xlib I've done, I'd be willing to believe that Win32 is simpler than Xlib... but I'd consider fighting you if you say that Wayland is simpler than either of them.

Wayland is like Vulkan or RISC ISAs... it's intended to be efficient for higher-level abstractions at the cost of being unfriendly to being directly interacted with by humans.

[varikonniemi]

Modern CPUs are so incredibly complex that it's implausible you won't occasionally need such tweaks.

As of today basically 2 really need such. This snowflake, and the abomination called atom.

Intel might have an excuse with atom, in that they decided to warpspeed into a market segment that they had no clue about. And the resulting product having no clue about computation is not very surprising.

This arm platform does not have such excuses.