Re: Anti-bloat side project

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 11:16:25PM +0200, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
> * Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> [2011-06-27 13:08:06 -0400]:
> > As an example it takes Python nearly 600 syscalls just to run a hello
> > world program, compared to about 40 for perl or bash and 20 for ash
> > (and of course about 3 for musl-linked C using stdio). Much of this
> > was spent searching nonsensical pathnames for config files and shared
> 
> i get different numbers on my (ubuntu) system

Yes, I was measuring with musl... Thanks for the figures.

> > and then sending reports (and possible fix ideas) to the upstream
> > maintainers. This is not something I plan to do myself (I'd rather
> > spend time improving musl) but I want to propose it as a way for
> > members of the community to contribute to positive anti-bloat work
> > that benefits a large number of users, as opposed to the alternative
> > of just boycotting software that "sucks" for bloat reasons. :-)
> 
> nice
> imho these issues are well known, ppl just don't care enough
> 
> i remember when the first google summer of codes was announced
> one of the first python project idea was to do something
> about the number of syscalls at startup
> http://wiki.python.org/moin/CodingProjectIdeas/PythonCore
> 
> it did not improve much since then, even in python3 ppl are
> complaining about the syscalls but devs say it does not matter
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-January/107771.html
> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-January/107789.html

Bleh. Has there been any serious work to document the causes and how
the code could be changed to fix the syscall bloat though? Or just
preliminat strace and wc -l?

Rich