Re: New syscall: leftpad()

Richard Weinberger
2016-04-01T08:06:14Z

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