I'm reading the documentation for fun while my friend installs Starcraft and it goes on and defines data types that are "guaranteed to be <x> in size" when the C standard did that a long time ago, I think. Maybe it's C99 but most libraries have that header. It takes, what, a minute to write?
Not only this, but it has its own memory allocation routines. As if stdlib isn't good enough. The dynamic array syntax isn't too horrible but I have my doubts as to its efficiency behind the scenes and I further wonder if it's really that useful.
Then, of course, there's this gem:
"GCompareFunc ()
gint (*GCompareFunc) (gconstpointer a,
gconstpointer b);
Specifies the type of a comparison function used to compare two values. The function should return a negative integer if the first value comes before the second, 0 if they are equal, or a positive integer if the first value comes after the second.
a : a value.
b : a value to compare with.
Returns : negative value if a < b; zero if a = b; positive value if a > b.
"
GCC is nice but it's been worked on by so many people it's bound to have some good code in it. And they're just now fixing the horrible brokenness of its architecture by redesigning it. a la XFree86. Yes, I'm talking about the 4.0 update. Don't get me wrong, the new GCC architecture will probably suck just as much but what the hey. IT'S OPEN SOURCE AND IT'S GNU AND LIKE RICHARD STALLMAN WROTE IT.
Which brings me to another point: EMACS SUCKS. IT SUCKS IT SUCKS IT SUCKS IT SUCKS. The keystroke combination for save-buffer is like "control-k, wait 4.51 seconds precisely, alt-0875, oh wait look, it crashed, time to redo everything in vi"
Note: the GNU bash man page documentation is all in one SINGLE man page. It's ENORMOUS. Do they actually expect anyone to read it? Seeing as how noone's bothered to implement a man page viewer with searching functions (or at least DOCUMENTED searching functions) that runs on a console.
And I'm off on a tangent here, but Linux distributions seem universally to set up bash so gnu-ls is pretty-color-gnu-ls. What do these people do when their terminals don't speak ANSI?
Also, why did GNU make --argument style arguments? What was wrong with what would later become POSIX-style arguments?
And the much-vaunted Hurd is doing, that's right, nothing for everyone... or is that noone? Whatever the case it's taking EONS to even pick itself out of the primordial ooze, metaphorically speaking.
Update on a GNOME developer: HE'S WRITING A "FREE" CLONE OF DOT NET. I don't think there's any commentary I can add to that other than: turmeric, perhaps you're right.
Actually, that's a pretty good line to sum up my little diary here.