Skip to main content

Open-source, subversion, mono, and gcc

I read a blog entry about a subject dear to my heart: migrating from cvs to svn. I know svn isn't perfect, but it's just so much better than cvs that it's no contest. If you have objections to svn that are even just a few months old, they have probably already been fixed. One of the first things I did at my new job was to perform the migration and everyone (well... all one other developer who was hired before I was and is still there) thinks it was a great move.

But I digress. Sort of.

Reading said blog, I thought, "Ha, cool! Those Mono guys whined about svn blame being slow, but then those manly GCC guys dug in and fixed the problem instead of whining some more!" What a poster-perfect picture for the virtues of open-source, huh?

Except, while looking for more details, it turns out that the developer responsible for the fix, Daniel Berlin, was a svn developer from way back. As well as (possibly more recently) gcc. (Does this guy ever sleep?)

So it's a little less heroic than it initially appeared, but still, not something you'd see in the closed-source world. "Hey, Microsoft: that bug in Excel, the one you weren't going to get to for a while? My buddy used to work on the Excel team. Mind letting him fix it for me?" Right.

If anyone knows a more complete/accurate summary of what happened here, my curiosity is piqued. The best I could find is from early in the process and not very detailed.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...
Post a Comment
Read more

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod...
Post a Comment
Read more

Python at Mozy.com

At my day job, I write code for a company called Berkeley Data Systems. (They found me through this blog, actually. It's been a good place to work.) Our first product is free online backup at mozy.com . Our second beta release was yesterday; the obvious problems have been fixed, so I feel reasonably good about blogging about it. Our back end, which is the most algorithmically complex part -- as opposed to fighting-Microsoft-APIs complex, as we have to in our desktop client -- is 90% in python with one C extension for speed. We (well, they, since I wasn't at the company at that point) initially chose Python for speed of development, and it's definitely fulfilled that expectation. (It's also lived up to its reputation for readability, in that the Python code has had 3 different developers -- in serial -- with very quick ramp-ups in each case. Python's succinctness and and one-obvious-way-to-do-it philosophy played a big part in this.) If you try it out, pleas...
9 comments
Read more