From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy) Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2017 16:04:10 -0700 Subject: [TUHS] Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet. In-Reply-To: References: <20171027103648.4030118C08A@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <20171027230410.GG6118@mcvoy.com> On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 11:51:12PM +0200, Andy Kosela wrote: > It seems that it is very hard to avoid bloat in the software world in the > long run. Most people don't care, but the original UNIX and C, Plan 9 and > Go projects could be one of the few I can think of that really cared about > minimalism. We cared. We being the BitKeeper guys. BK as of 2002 (bk-2.0.5): 33 documented commands wc *.c 67633 225563 1565556 total BK as of 15 years later (bk-7.3.2) 165 documented commands wc *.c 125812 444197 3017977 total So we doubled in size for all the built in commands but we had 5x as many commands. A huge amount of functionality over the bk-2.x era. The only way we did that was by encouraging and rewarding commits that took out as much as they put in. It's possible but you have to be disciplined. --lm