From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1758598AbcDAIGO (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Apr 2016 04:06:14 -0400 Received: from a.ns.miles-group.at ([95.130.255.143]:11950 "EHLO radon.swed.at" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757068AbcDAIGJ (ORCPT ); Fri, 1 Apr 2016 04:06:09 -0400 Subject: Re: New syscall: leftpad() To: Randy Dunlap , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org References: <1459463613-32473-1-git-send-email-richard@nod.at> <56FDB478.4020609@infradead.org> Cc: linux-api@vger.kernel.org From: Richard Weinberger Message-ID: <56FE2BED.2060402@nod.at> Date: Fri, 1 Apr 2016 10:06:05 +0200 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.7.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <56FDB478.4020609@infradead.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Am 01.04.2016 um 01:36 schrieb Randy Dunlap: > Please be more careful in your description... I'm very sorry. Will do a v2 soon. ;-) > On 03/31/16 15:33, Richard Weinberger wrote: >> Recent happenings in the node.js community showed how fragile software is when >> it comes to dependencies of fundamental algorithms like leftpad[1]. >> A node.js package which provided ledpad vanished and broke a lot of software. > > leftpad > >> This raised our attention and we came to the conclusion that it is the kernel's >> job to provide such functionality such that node.js based applications can in future >> rely in Linux's "don't break userspace" rule. >> We hope that glibc and Andoid's bionic will soon offer wrapper functions for this > > Android's > >> new leftpad system call. >> We put leftpad into the kernel not only because of Linux's stable ABI, >> also for performance reasons. >> As everyone knows, within the kernel everything is faster and better. >> Leftpad has millions of users, so it has to be as fast as possible. >> This new system call will also help making services like left-pad.io[2] >> faster and more reliable. If the leftpad() system call gets adopted by a wider user base >> it might also make sense to add a generic npm() system call which acts like ioctl() >> where kernel modules can register new functions that are often used by node.js. >> Such functions might be, is_array(), is_int(), etc. > > Thanks, //richard