Linus Rejects "Size Of Member" Change From Linux 5.5 Kernel

[microcode]

I actually talked about this with a teenager, and they said “hah, you said member”. It donned on me that I am getting old at just 22.

On a more serious note, Linus makes a perfectly good point. There is no good reason it can't be sizeof_field like it already is elsewhere, and "field" is a perfectly good name for the parts of a struct, at least as much as "member".

[aht0]

Google is trying to measure the size of it's business' member, that very typical of them.

Hardly, Sites belonging to Alphabet/Google are most visited in the world, in absolute numbers.

[timofonic]

Hardly, Sites belonging to Alphabet/Google are most visited in the world, in absolute numbers.

You measured their members, that's what I meant

[archibald]

I actually talked about this with a teenager, and they said “hah, you said member”. It donned on me that I am getting old at just 22.

It's not that you're getting old, it's that the teenager isn't yet mature

On a more serious note, Linus makes a perfectly good point. There is no good reason it can't be sizeof_field like it already is elsewhere, and "field" is a perfectly good name for the parts of a struct, at least as much as "member".

I disagree on your latter point - whilst 'field' is a generic term, their name in the C language is 'member'. However, I think Linus has made a good decision - however much I agree with the person who responded to him and said "that 13 year old can grow up" - just by looking at the comments on here.

With all that said, the naming conventions of a project on which I don't work aren't something I'm going to spend any great length of time worrying about.

[Guest]

I guess size doesn't matter after all…

[aht0]

It's not that you're getting old, it's that the teenager isn't yet mature



I disagree on your latter point - whilst 'field' is a generic term, their name in the C language is 'member'. However, I think Linus has made a good decision - however much I agree with the person who responded to him and said "that 13 year old can grow up" - just by looking at the comments on here.

With all that said, the naming conventions of a project on which I don't work aren't something I'm going to spend any great length of time worrying about.

Linus also has to take into account or the aspects of PR. CoC was more or less forced down his throat (no pun intended!) - he most likely does not want any negative publicity from extreme lunatic/fringe groups castigating Linux for being sexist.

[kpedersen]

I don't know if this belongs in stddef.h; possibly nonstandard/linux/defs.h?

This MACRO isn't too daft though; the one I possibly wish they would stop using is offsetof. This is non-standard code and requires hacks in the compiler itself (currently just clang and gcc support it).

[DanielG]

Who fucking cares if some internal kernel macros are unified under a common name or not and what nam it would be?
How is this newsworthy to end-users?

Is there really nothing more interesting to write about? Maybe open source games or stuff like that?

[timofonic]

Linus also has to take into account or the aspects of PR. CoC was more or less forced down his throat (no pun intended!) - he most likely does not want any negative publicity from extreme lunatic/fringe groups castigating Linux for being sexist.

I guess Linus cares about sizeof_member when it's forced down his throat...

[mroche]

Follow up statement (by Linus) on the matter:

> Call it what the standard calls it.

... or, you know, call it what the individual parts of a data structure is called in computer science in general: fields.

That really is standard naming too, Joe. Just to quote Wikipedia

"A record (also called tuple or struct) is an aggregate data structure. A record is a value that contains other values, typically in fixed number and sequence and typically indexed by names. The elements of records are usually called fields or members"

see?

Do we name things by their C implementation, or by their generic CS names? Sometimes one, sometimes the other.

But the fact is, "field" really isn't wrong AND IT IS WHAT WE ALREADY USE.

And last time I pointed out that at least according to a quick grep, we use "field" a whole lot more than we use "member".

Possibly exactly because that's the typical generic name.

Cheers,
Mike