[Ffmpeg-devel] Re: On2 vs libvp62

[Rich Felker]

On Thu, Apr 20, 2006 at 08:50:34AM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> Rich Felker <dalias at aerifal.cx> writes:
> 
> > On Wed, Apr 19, 2006 at 08:36:39AM +0100, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> >> bad it is.  The reason bad closed source is perhaps more wide-spread
> >> is that behind a bad commercial product there is usually a marketing
> >> department that may be able to spin something that makes the product
> >> sell despite its flaws.  An open source product is promoted by its
> >> quality alone, meaning that the bad ones won't be used by many people.
> >
> > No, unfortunately "open source" has marketing departments too. Just
> > look at Xiph.org! Or an even better example: Redhat and all their
> > horrible bugware/bloatware (GNOME, gcc, glibc, ...).
> 
> OK, I partially agree with you there.  Gnome and KDE are indeed
> monsters, and I don't use them.  I don't see why you bundle gcc and
> glibc in this category though.  Neither is crammed full of dubious
> features just for the sake of it, even if gcc could be improved in a
> few places, and glibc is admittedly fairly large.

Both are roughly 20-100 times as large as they should be.

glibc _is_ full of dubious features. Take the list of functions
defined in POSIX/SUSv3 and diff it against the list of symbols in
glibc. The differences are all GNU extensions which no portable
program (i.e. most all real-world programs) will use.

gcc is full of nonstandard extensions which people _do_ use, making
their programs extremely gcc-dependent. A few of these are useful;
most are "dubious features". Overall it's is bad because a replacement
for gcc could compile code 3-100 times faster (depending on
optimization levels) and generate better code, but it's hard to
duplicate both the full C language _and_ all the gcc-extension crap on
top of it. These days almost all of gcc development efforts go into
useless C++ stuff (and other unnecessary languages), and rather than
keeping this bloat separate they integrate it into the core and make C
programs suffer the consequences.

I could rant for 100kb on all the bloat and bugs of gcc and glibc but
I won't right now. If you really want to know more ask me in private
and I'll send you some docs.

Rich