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jgalar

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That's not the reason why I publish OSS. I also publish that software under specific licenses that impose specific obligations (e.g., making the source available to users and attribution being given to the original author(s)).

My worst close-calls were a result of ABS engaging at very low speed. In all cases, I reduced the speed to 2-3 MPH approaching a snowy intersection, but the car refused to let the wheels lock and "sink" in the snow.

Instead, it's all too happy to drift into oncoming traffic at a glacial pace. It could be specific to the various Toyotas I have owned...

In my experience, having to explain a software's design in plain English often reveals that some aspects were poorly thought-out in the first place.

That's not true.

For example, the microphone of the X1 Carbon 7th generation still doesn't work out of the box. You need to blacklist a handful of kernel modules and edit your PulseAudio configuration to force the loading of an ALSA source hooked to the correct device ID.

The Arch wiki has an article cataloguing issues and workarounds (with various degrees of success) for every generation of the X1.

I'm from Montreal. It's not "chambre-a-montrer", it's "salle de montre". Also "coussin-a-gonfler" is "coussin glonflable".

As for computer-science related words, I think the OQLF (French Language Office) does a great job overall. "Courriel" (e-mail) is one of their best contributions and is used regularly.

Yes, and they will also move the goal posts when you explain why their solution doesn't work.

I feel there is something missing in this whole discussion and that's the question of unsolicited advice. I don't think anyone will feel insulted if the j-word comes out after they have asked for help on a problem.

On the other hand, It's hard not to feel like that question is condescending when it is unsolicited.

Full disclosure, I work on LTTng and a 20% improvement is a huge deal to our users, so I'm certainly biased here.

As far as I know, the thread-local write only occurs if a rseq region is set. The added cost to a context switch seems essentially limited to a branch: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d7822b1e24f2df5df98...

The other benchmarks that were posted in the various threads leading to this merge looked fairly impressive to me.

Of the top of my head, jemalloc benefited a lot from this patchset, and not just on the run-time front: https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/10/10/332

Mathieu's (patch author) main motivation was removing atomic operation from the LTTng userspace tracer's hot path.

In that case, the per-cpu data is the 'reserve' and 'commit' counters that must be updated when the tracer saves an event to the per-CPU buffers.

Other uses that I'm aware of include memory allocators that maintain per-CPU arenas.

IMO, it really depends on the context. If you are working with people who share your assessment of the current situation (both business and technical folks) and want to improve it, you'll have a great chance to learn from others' (and your) mistakes.

However, constantly putting off fires, under the gun, in horrible code bases, is probably not a good way to learn how to design software... It's a good way to learn how to debug and reason about problems, which is also a valuable skill to develop, though.