A couple of bits and pieces

Wow this really turned into a monster post, I guess I had a lot of crap on my mind. So much for going for a ride today as i'd hoped - the wind really picked up anyway so it wouldn't have been much fun.

On Software Engineering ...

First, a couple of interesting posts on a blog run by a guy from Insomniac (Ratchet & Clank, Resistance, etc). I've read bits of his before because he has some posts about CELL coding, but I came across his revamped site recently whilst looking up issues about C99's un-ANSI-C-ed-ness.

Three Big Lies of Software Development. I think they are pretty fundamental things that every programmer needs to keep in mind. The first is the scourge of pretty much all modern software - and why software seems to stay about the same speed even though hardware has jumped in leaps and bounds. The second I suggest could be squarely aimed at every introductory course to `object oriented design' and is exacerbated by the first lie. And the third is probably the most important; it's the data, stupid.

Sketches on on concurrency, data design, and performance is also a must read in this day and age of multi-processors. The post-it notes are a particularly nice touch although the PDF versions are much nicer to read than the web gallery. I particularly like his rant against typical C++, and how he explains that ideas such as a 'lock free doubly-linked list' are nonsensical in a concurrent environment. e.g. with no 'after' or 'before', how can you insert 'after' or 'before', and without an insert 'after' or 'before', it is no longer the same ADT.

And finally the aforementioned reference to C99's weirdness in understanding strict aliasing. I see why they added this feature - to enable optimisations that a compiler couldn't otherwise do (but looked obvious to an author), but to me it just isn't `C' any more, it's a slightly different language (and worse, it conflicts explicitly with the sort of stuff you need to do to make normal C faster or do operating-system type tasks). Anyway, I think this particular comment really tells the story, with my own emphasis:

The above source when compiled with GCC 3.4.1 or GCC 4.0 with the -Wstrict-aliasing=2 flag enabled will NOT generate a warning. This should serve as an example to always check the generated code. Warnings are often helpful hints, but they are by no means exaustive and do not always detect when a programmer makes an error. Like any peice of software, a compiler has limits. Knowing them can only be helpful.

I'm not sure that even I would be terrible comfortable with a language where that was a requirement - and I suspect i'd be far more comfortable with it than the majority. I was looking this stuff up because Jeff was chatting to me about some of my code in Evolution that a recent gcc was just silently dropping because it aliased some pointers. Funny, I thought that's what casts were for - and it's not like you can't still do it, you can just use a union to do exactly same thing; it's just a lot messier for humans to read. Anyway, that post is a really good explanation of the issue and how to change your code to fit the newer C variant so the compiler can make it run (potentially quite a bit) faster.

Anyway, a very interesting few posts on Mr Acton's site - it's a pity he doesn't update it a little more often (there's more on Insomniacs R&D site too, much more I still need to read myself).

On Menus ...

Odd information I feel the need to share: IceCat (Firefox) gets a little unwieldy with 180 tabs open, I think this is the fourth copy of A Hacker's Craic open because I can't be bothered to find the other ones. It still runs though.

Which leads me on to partly why ... scrolling @#@#ing menus. What idiot decided they belonged in any modern toolkit (let me guess, they're in Cocoa)? I remember seeing some GUI toolkit implement them in the early 90's and thought `that looked pretty cool' - but they aren't. They suck. They don't scale, and they're difficult to use. Even a small list on a button at the top or bottom of the screen will put on tiny hard-to-hit and hard-to-use up/down arrows if you've previously selected an item at the wrong part of the list. Try using one with a G-spot under your finger.

This my friend, is a G-spot.

So here's a perfect example in Evince, which I have been using heavily recently (more on that later). It looks pretty and all, nice and simple and obvious and `easy to use'.



Now look what happens when you access it from Evince running in full-screen mode. And this is only one of the possibilities, you get various, quite-different results depending on exactly where within the button you click and if the mouse moves whilst you press on it with your finger e.g. if you click near the top it actually selects `Best Fit' for you and removes the scrolling buttons since the mouse is suddenly over the 'up scroll region' and not over the current item.



Hmm, nice one. It looks like arse, is completely unnecessary, and those silly little `scroll region/buttons' are too hard to use; apart from being too small, they're actually a whole new type of button which aren't used anywhere else in any GUI - a `click-less button', or `hover button' if you will. I'm using a fairly old Evince, so these might be bugs specific to the version, but the whole idea stinks and it's going to always have these sorts of serious usability issues - a menu that can look different every time you use it isn't going to aid muscle memory for starters. Not to mention the stupid `hover buttons' that you need to put your mouse over and wait ... wait ... wait for it to show the desired item.

The problem is it's mixing two access modes, a 'click' and a 'hover mode' - once you click on the button you're in 'hover mode' - whatever the mouse is over is selected or activated. So it has to attempt to ensure the mouse is over the right location when you click, and since it wont warp the mouse pointer, it warps the menu instead. Even mouse pointer warping would be (much) better than this, but there are alternatives like staying in a 'click' mode and just requiring another click to actually select an option. It sort of does this if you don't move when you 'click', but I don't know many mice that don't move most of the time when you physically push part of them, so it's even worse - you could get either behaviour depending on how steady your hand is. In the Firefox case with 180 items it would just never work anyway, it's just the wrong UI element to use.

As for Evince, I think i'm stuck using the wrong tool for the job. It's not really much of a document reader once you get a document with over few dozen pages. The search is very slow too, on my workstation it takes about 70 seconds (depending greatly on the search string) to scan the OMAP3 TRM (~3500 pages); although I realise this has a lot to do with the PDF format. fgrep scans the whole 22MB raw file in 0.035s. Add no find all, and the fact it forgets the last search as soon as you click somewhere, and it's pretty painful. Not to mention the lack of navigation stack and other basics which get in the way. Ok perhaps it is intended to be a simple viewer for 'users' - but developers are friggan `users' too.

Now, there was something else I wanted to mention ... what was it. Damn, completely gone. Oh oh, no, here it comes. It's about `distributions'.

On Distributions ...

On the Haiku lists there's been some discussions about package management. And that naturally leads to the idea of a `distribution' - which the Haiku guys are fundamentally against, and I think with good reason.

What exactly is a `distribution'? It's a collection of software which has been thrown together and presumably validated to some extent in such a way as to work together. In a way it is a kind of `neat' thing, and one that can only exist because all the software is free software; every single piece of third software can (potentially) be compiled and validated specifically for the target platform. This is a pretty fundamental change to the way software is distributed, and can lead to fundamentally different outcomes, for example with security, or platform support. Even a lowly IRC client is under complete vendor control, so can be prevented from becoming a penetration attack vector because of some sloppy code or accidents. Or a vendor can rebuild everything for a different hardware platform without having to wait for every ISV to support it. And upgrading can be a bit fun if your computer is a playground - discovering all the new features of every application (until you're a jaded old prick like me, where half the changes are frustratingly stupid).

So, there are many benefits from `distribution' based deployment.

However there are problems as well. We all used to scowl at how M$ forces everyone onto the upgrade treadmill, but although different in nature, is quite a problem with `distribution' based software too. In some ways it is worse - you actually have to upgrade all of your software at once; and this is not always a good thing. New versions means new bugs, and with the propensity for the most active developers being rewarded with having their projects anointed for inclusion, often stable mature applications are replaced with unstable shinier newer ones. Some previously existing software may not make the cut at all, so you can't even keep using it if you wanted to. And although it's more of a serious problem for proprietary software (and thus not particularly important), the upgrade mill affects free software too - it can be extremely tough going compiling older software to a usable state - and probably drag in a whole pile of tools and libraries not used elsewhere. In effect old software bit-rots faster than it needs to, and is effectively locked out and thrown away. This is particularly acute with the modern scourge of using massive and complex frameworks which change in incompatible ways from version to version in time-frames of 5 years or less.

The strength of a Unix-like `open platform' is also it's major weakness. For example, by having the option to use different toolkits in X, every dog and his man will choose a different toolkit for their apps. And this just multiplies all of the potential issues that large-scale code faces; project goals, consistent design philosophy, bugs and maintenance. Not only do you have these problems within a given software `platform', it is multiplied across all of them.

Just look at the completely fucked-up-mess that sound is. Just imagine the state we'd be in if the kernel didn't implement TCP/IP but we had 4 or 5 different, incompatible, and competing implementations running in user-land. Sound is just as fundamentally a hardware issue as networking is, so why isn't it all just in the kernel the same way? And i'm talking about the full audio stack here, not just a buffer to a DAC which is all Linux will allow, throwing the guts of modern sound off to user-land. After all, we don't have user-land switching of the ethernet packets do we?

So I think what the Haiku devs are really trying to avoid is such a mess infiltrating their system. Without this crap to deal with there just isn't any need for a `distribution' in the first place. And even the fact of having a single GUI toolkit with tighter focus will take a lot less effort to maintain than a dozen (regardless of the matter of spreading the load), and more importantly provide the user with a more consistent and pleasant experience. And developers too for that matter; having a choice just means the wrong one can be taken.

Hmm, I like the sound of that, and can't find any reference in a web search, so with a bit of outright ego-tism, I shall claim it to be my own.

Zucchi's Law

“Having a choice always leads to
the wrong option being taken
at least some of the time.”

Somewhat analagous to Murphy's Law I guess, but the key difference is this is about the limitations of informed choice and the fallibility of humans, not of their environment.

There's nothing technical stopping GNU/Linux doing the same thing, but there's too much `wet ware' in the way, so the politics make it completely impossible. It will take another operating system to do it. That's all Android or ChromeOS are; a single toolkit and application environment with less choice for the developer, but still built on the same base operating system.