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From: Joerg Mertens <joerg-mertens@t-online.de>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: strlcpy and how CPUs can defy common sense
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2024 11:42:29 +0200
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Jul 2024 19:58:06 -0000 (UTC), John McCue wrote:
> 
>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 26 Jul 2024 15:36:17 -0000 (UTC), Ben Collver wrote:
>>> 
>>>> The situation only gets worse for the openbsd version here, not
>>>> better.
>>> 
>>> Not the only time the GNU folks have done something smarter than the
>>> BSD folks.
>> 
>> I do not understand this statement in regards to true(1).
>> 
>>> <http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html>
>> 
>> This is interesting
>> 
>>> <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/10/line_break_ep2/>
>> 
>> How is GNU's version of true better than OpenBSD's ?
>> See page 2 in the articke.
> 
> You have to put the two together to realize how hilariously wrong the 
> “Register” article is. The OpenBSD version of “true” may seem concise and 
> elegant, until you notice that it requires the loading of an entirely new 
> shell instance to run each time.
> 
> Whereas the GNU version, with its much longer source code entirely in C, 
> loads faster and runs in less memory. Which was one of the points made in 
> the first article.

At least Theo de Raadt agrees with you in this commit message from
about eight years ago¹:

-----
Switch back to C versions of true/false.  I do not accept any of the
arguments made 20 years ago.  A small elf binary is smaller and faster
than a large elf binary running a script.  Noone cares about the file
sizes on disk.
-----

The interesting word is `back´, which means, they already had had a
C version in earlier days and then at some point had switched to a
script.  Someone would have to go through CVS history to find the 
reason why.

1) https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.bin/true/true.c