Re: Call for ideas for future musl-related talks

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 01:29:30AM +0100, Szabolcs Nagy wrote:
> my whishlist is
> 
> - why do posix and c matter in the age of web/mobile/cloud
> 
> - good/bad/ugly parts of posix/linux/toolchain from libc pov
> 
> - metrics (benchmarks, size, complexity, amount of libc code
> executed in various use-cases, time spent in libc, etc)

I like your ideas, and IMO this is potentially interesting as a
less-technical talk -- or at least one that's compelling to a less
technical audience but that still gives an opportunity to bring in
technical material.

The "why does it matter" part is nice for bringing up the pitfalls of
container deployment with glibc and mainstream library stacks --
circular dependencies and difficulty of reproducible builds, need for
large supporting infrastructure in your containers, large bug/attack
surface, etc. Of course this doesn't really cover the matter of why
C/POSIX are needed (versus e.g. a core OS built on node.js or lua or
similar) but that's an opportunity to talk about resource accounting
and how hard it is to make a robust system groundwork in a language
that doesn't have a concept of storage and storage duration.

Rich