This needs some heavy checking... (line 1029) (opens in new tab)

(github.com)

30 pointsdennis_moore4y ago63 comments

63 comments

You can link directly to a line by appending #<line_number>

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba3...

Another fun github hack: if you browse the repo for a particular file, the URL will be something like

    github.com/user/repo/blob/master/foo/bar/baz.py

But this file can change, meaning this url might not have the same content a week or month down the road. This is particularly troublesome when you have lines selected. To fix this, press `y` and your url will get expanded to include the current commit hash:

    github.com/user/repo/blob/e4ecae.../foo/bar/baz.py

Now your URL is safe to share.

umvi4y ago

You can also change "github.com" to "github1s.com" or "github.dev" if you want to view it in VSCode in browser.

i.e.

https://github.dev/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba3...

https://github1s.com/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421b...

thunderbong4y ago

Or just press '.' if you're logged in

pan694y ago

Or just click on the line number to change the URL to that line.

gabrielsroka4y ago

And shift-click on a second line to select a block.

dennis_mooreOP4y ago

I tried that but everything after the # got stripped when I submitted the link.

lapetitejort4y ago

I spied a goto. Ctrl/Command+F spies 60 gotos. CS students: point to the Linux source code if your professor ever gives you grief about gotos.

dblohm74y ago

One of the first codebases I ever worked on professionally allowed gotos as part of its style guide, but only under two conditions:

1. You're using the goto for error handling and cleanup in a function; and

2. You only jump in a forward direction.

thechao4y ago

The C `switch` statement and `goto` were made for each other, too.

TheSockStealer4y ago

Used like this, it is not much different than a try-catch block

2 more replies

Jtsummers4y ago

Or Knuth's take on it: https://pic.plover.com/knuth-GOTO.pdf [pdf] Structured Programming with go to Statements. Which helps to clarify why go to statements are both useful and worth minimizing, from a person who makes extensive use of goto statements in a lot of their code.

alkonaut4y ago

Not all gotos are made equal. A hundred gotos jumping forward to the same cleanup/error tail is very readable and actually reduces complexity over alternatives - which it’s obviously why it’s used. In many languages this type of construct has the form of try/catch/finally but those are glorified forward gotos.

Seeing even one goto jumping backward would be much more surprising, and seeing what made gotos get their bad rep, overlapping goto regions, would be completely shocking in any quality code base.

anyfoo4y ago

Kernels written in C are often full of gotos. There's nothing wrong with gotos per se, it's only harmful if that's your (or one of your) primary means of control flow, e.g. because you don't have other good options. BASIC for example had that problem back in the day.

ArnoVW4y ago

Well, many BASICs had GOSUB, which sort of gave you function calls (albeit sans parameters)

1 more reply

umvi4y ago

Gotos can be used to effectively accomplish try/catch in C. As long as you stick to a safe goto idiom like this then they can be useful. In general, an inexperienced programmer taught that goto is okay is probably not going to stick to safe idioms and will instead create spaghetti code, hence why they are steered away.

SAI_Peregrinus4y ago

I'd be more likely to use setjmp/longjmp to accomplish try/catch in C than goto. Goto is fine for error handling, but exceptions are a bit different, since they have the try/catch/finally structure. Personally I prefer to avoid exceptions, but if I were forced to implement them I'd not use goto!

sshine4y ago

I’ll name Linux my go-to argument in this whole debate.

CodeGlitch4y ago

Other gotos include:

- if-statements

- switch-statements

- break

- continue

- exception handling

The whole "gotos are bad" really needs to die.

throwaddzuzxd4y ago

The whole point of "gotos are bad" is that they don't carry semantics. All your list is composed of semantic gotos, and are not considered bad.

sgerenser4y ago

gotos arent’t bad, they’re just “considered harmful”

klyrs4y ago

Dijkstra is dead and we can move on from his peeves.

1 more reply

dennis_mooreOP4y ago

I find it mildly entertaining to casually browse random 17-year-old code lying at the heart of the Linux kernel and encounter gems like this.

harrylepotter4y ago

Hate to break it to you, but December 1991 was 30 years ago.

sli4y ago

That's the original date on the file, but the comment being discussed (and much of the code in that function, it seems) was from 17 years ago. See the git-blame:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba...

3 more replies

quickthrower24y ago

Ha ha. Yeah Linus worked on Linux before Git unfortunately. Or fortunately maybe (because the world needed Linux before it needed git)

mark-r4y ago

Thanks for making me feel old.

the_svd_doctor4y ago

Yes but git-blame shows 17 years ago.

3 more replies

quickthrower24y ago

It's a weird feeling where if you work on this code, it must be like living archaeology, digging up remains, but at the same time sculpting new remains for the next generation. The other profession that must be like this is Law. In some ways this file feels more permanent than the blockchain. Although someone might come refactor it to Rust one day! If you do keep the comments at least!

jfk134y ago

It's a touch nicer (IMO) if you link directly to the specific lines you're referring to, like: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba3...

boricj4y ago

As someone who has done some OS development and sysadmin work, I can relate to that quote. The 1st edition of Unix is over 50 years old and some of the legacy cruft that has accumulated since is so sedimented I swear it's going to turn into oil any minute now.

dgellow4y ago

    /*
    * Samma på svenska..
    */

m4634y ago

"SAMMA PÅ SVENSKA" (english: "same in swedish")

turdnagel4y ago

A meta comment on the comments on this article: as one might expect post-"goto fail"[1] there are a lot of people saying "hey this should be refactored, no goto!" I thought that at first when looking at the code, given what I remember of the Apple SSL vulnerability, and how "goto" has a smell. But, as it turns out, there are sane reasons to use goto in systems programming, especially as a kind of cleanup / finally block. TIL.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7282005

emerged4y ago

In plain c, goto is about the only sane way to do error handling in an ergonomic and easily maintainable way. The only cost is the goto stigma (which is generally justified).

flerchin4y ago

In a modern codebase, would there be tests for code like this? Is it too late for a plucky contributor to start adding them?

pm2154y ago

It's not in the codebase proper, but the Linux Test Project https://github.com/linux-test-project/ltp is probably a good place to start to see what's currently being tested for a syscall and to add new tests if there's a gap. https://github.com/linux-test-project/ltp/tree/master/testca... is some tests of this particular syscall.

flerchin4y ago

I guess it's too scary to touch, but I feel like such code could be refactored to not use goto, amongst other issues.

Jtsummers4y ago

The use of goto out (or similar) is idiomatic in a lot of kernel code. Since C has no notion of defer (like Go) or a finally block (like languages with exceptions), you place the code you want to always execute at the end, and then goto out instead of returning earlier.

The other option, in functions like this, is to have duplicated "deferred" execution scattered throughout the function at each return point. This is a maintenance nightmare as it can be hard to discern which code is actually part of the "deferred" block (and needs to be copied) and which isn't, at least at a glance. So differences in two return points are clues that something may be wrong, but requires further investigation to determine if they should or should not be the same. As a function grows in size, this becomes increasingly problematic.

It's actually a good demonstration of DRY.

jdeaton4y ago

goto usage in systems programming is actually much more prevalent and less of an anti-pattern/smell than in other contexts. This is because you often need to ensure every resource acquired during the function is cleaned up along each branch that the function could exit through. Because in systems programming you'll often do an operation, check if it succeeded and exit if not. The goto resource cleanup pattern avoids you having to duplicate the clean-up-partially-acquired-resouces at every early-return statement.

svdree4y ago

There was some discussion on this years ago on lkml, you can read it e.g. here: https://koblents.com/Ches/Links/20-Using-Goto-in-Linux-Kerne...

m4634y ago

I've found that in critical "must work" code with lots of edge/failure cases that goto is sometimes a pretty robust solution.

Also, apart from straight-line functions it's hard to avoid goto at the machine code level.

cosmolev4y ago

It could be refactored and it could become less efficient afterwards.

Jtsummers4y ago

Looking through that file, I didn't see a single goto (but I could have missed one) that didn't go to one of: unlock_out, out, or error. I don't think there would be any diminishment of runtime efficiency if you dropped the goto statements, and it may actually improve performance to drop them since they correspond to a jump that could be removed from each of their occurrences. Though it would also increase the code size (everything in that section of code has to be replicated), so that could be an issue. Tradeoffs, would have to be measured to know for sure.

However, they do improve the maintainability of the code. I find it interesting, looking at them and having done a quick reread of Knuth's take on goto statements (for another comment I made here) that these uses correspond to what other languages possess as syntactic elements in the structured programming vein, which is one of the things he discusses in favor of both structured programming and goto statements. In favor of structured programming, you get new syntactic elements that provide useful semantics that make the code clearer. Why are we doing this jump? Oh, it's a conditional (if/then/else) or a loop (for, while). But when you lack the syntax and semantics for that, the goto statement can fill in the gaps (when used carefully, deliberately).

Specifically, out mostly corresponds to defer (in Go) or finally in other languages. error is like try/catch/finally in Java and others. unlock_out would be like the with statements you get in some other languages.

EDIT: Reexamined this specific source file. Most of the out sections are 0-2 statements in addition to the return. So in the 0 case, there ought to be a performance improvement by just returning, though I imagine a compiler can optimize the goto's away. In the 1-2 statement range it'd be a tossup on whether the increase in function size would cost more (cache miss and similar) than the indirection itself costs. I only saw one (it's a large file, I didn't look too closely) that had a larger out section than 2 statements, and that one had enough that the indirection is probably worth the performance cost.

But, in all cases (except the 0-statement case) it still is better from a maintainability perspective, whether or not it helps performance. In the 0-statement case, I wonder if they're vestigial. If there were other statements included that were dropped for some reason. But I'm not going to dig further into this because now it's time for me to study.

rcoveson4y ago

There also isn't a comment on every line, no test coverage that I can see, many functions are longer than 20 lines, and many of these source files are way too big at thousands of lines.

Probably easier to throw the whole thing out and start again.

rmbyrro4y ago

At first I thought you were joking, but perhaps you were serious about it?

I can't tell and I'm literally LOL right now because of that

1 more reply

rmbyrro4y ago

No, it must be a joke.

> There also isn't a comment on every line

This must be a joke LOL

Why are folks downvoting?

2 more replies

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

63 comments

codingkev4y ago

You can link directly to a line by appending #<line_number>

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba3...

whalesalad4y ago

Another fun github hack: if you browse the repo for a particular file, the URL will be something like

    github.com/user/repo/blob/master/foo/bar/baz.py

    github.com/user/repo/blob/e4ecae.../foo/bar/baz.py

Now your URL is safe to share.

umvi4y ago

You can also change "github.com" to "github1s.com" or "github.dev" if you want to view it in VSCode in browser.

i.e.

https://github.dev/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba3...

https://github1s.com/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421b...

thunderbong4y ago

Or just press '.' if you're logged in

pan694y ago

Or just click on the line number to change the URL to that line.

gabrielsroka4y ago

And shift-click on a second line to select a block.

dennis_mooreOP4y ago

I tried that but everything after the # got stripped when I submitted the link.

lapetitejort4y ago

I spied a goto. Ctrl/Command+F spies 60 gotos. CS students: point to the Linux source code if your professor ever gives you grief about gotos.

dblohm74y ago

One of the first codebases I ever worked on professionally allowed gotos as part of its style guide, but only under two conditions:

1. You're using the goto for error handling and cleanup in a function; and

2. You only jump in a forward direction.

thechao4y ago

The C `switch` statement and `goto` were made for each other, too.

TheSockStealer4y ago

Used like this, it is not much different than a try-catch block

2 more replies

Jtsummers4y ago

alkonaut4y ago

Seeing even one goto jumping backward would be much more surprising, and seeing what made gotos get their bad rep, overlapping goto regions, would be completely shocking in any quality code base.

anyfoo4y ago

ArnoVW4y ago

Well, many BASICs had GOSUB, which sort of gave you function calls (albeit sans parameters)

1 more reply

umvi4y ago

SAI_Peregrinus4y ago

sshine4y ago

I’ll name Linux my go-to argument in this whole debate.

CodeGlitch4y ago

Other gotos include:

- if-statements

- switch-statements

- break

- continue

- exception handling

The whole "gotos are bad" really needs to die.

throwaddzuzxd4y ago

The whole point of "gotos are bad" is that they don't carry semantics. All your list is composed of semantic gotos, and are not considered bad.

sgerenser4y ago

gotos arent’t bad, they’re just “considered harmful”

klyrs4y ago

Dijkstra is dead and we can move on from his peeves.

1 more reply

dennis_mooreOP4y ago

I find it mildly entertaining to casually browse random 17-year-old code lying at the heart of the Linux kernel and encounter gems like this.

harrylepotter4y ago

Hate to break it to you, but December 1991 was 30 years ago.

sli4y ago

That's the original date on the file, but the comment being discussed (and much of the code in that function, it seems) was from 17 years ago. See the git-blame:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba...

3 more replies

quickthrower24y ago

Ha ha. Yeah Linus worked on Linux before Git unfortunately. Or fortunately maybe (because the world needed Linux before it needed git)

mark-r4y ago

Thanks for making me feel old.

the_svd_doctor4y ago

Yes but git-blame shows 17 years ago.

3 more replies

quickthrower24y ago

jfk134y ago

It's a touch nicer (IMO) if you link directly to the specific lines you're referring to, like: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/f4bc5bbb5fef3cf421ba3...

boricj4y ago

dgellow4y ago

    /*
    * Samma på svenska..
    */

m4634y ago

"SAMMA PÅ SVENSKA" (english: "same in swedish")

turdnagel4y ago

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7282005

emerged4y ago

In plain c, goto is about the only sane way to do error handling in an ergonomic and easily maintainable way. The only cost is the goto stigma (which is generally justified).

flerchin4y ago

In a modern codebase, would there be tests for code like this? Is it too late for a plucky contributor to start adding them?

pm2154y ago

flerchin4y ago

I guess it's too scary to touch, but I feel like such code could be refactored to not use goto, amongst other issues.

Jtsummers4y ago

It's actually a good demonstration of DRY.

jdeaton4y ago

svdree4y ago

There was some discussion on this years ago on lkml, you can read it e.g. here: https://koblents.com/Ches/Links/20-Using-Goto-in-Linux-Kerne...

m4634y ago

I've found that in critical "must work" code with lots of edge/failure cases that goto is sometimes a pretty robust solution.

Also, apart from straight-line functions it's hard to avoid goto at the machine code level.

cosmolev4y ago

It could be refactored and it could become less efficient afterwards.

Jtsummers4y ago

rcoveson4y ago

There also isn't a comment on every line, no test coverage that I can see, many functions are longer than 20 lines, and many of these source files are way too big at thousands of lines.

Probably easier to throw the whole thing out and start again.

rmbyrro4y ago

At first I thought you were joking, but perhaps you were serious about it?

I can't tell and I'm literally LOL right now because of that

1 more reply

rmbyrro4y ago

No, it must be a joke.

> There also isn't a comment on every line

This must be a joke LOL

Why are folks downvoting?

2 more replies

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse