Note that LWN is an excellent weekly Linux publication that uses the subscription model. Articles are first only visible to subscribers, and then after a week to the the general public.
As a sort of gesture to the community, they added a "Send a free link" option that allows readers to send an article to a friend or colleague before this one-week period ends. This feature was really a nice gesture towards the LWN community.
Clearly this feature now abused to send an article to a website with a large readership (since it is still in the one week subscriber-only period), which is really sad, given that LWN always had to put a lot of effort into generating enough income to compensate their authors.
So, if you like the depth and quality of the article, please consider becoming a subscriber. It's really affordable, and provides genuinely good Linux/Unix-related content.
Note: I am not affiliated with LWN, just a happy subscriber, sad to see a nice feature misused.
"This feature is made available as a service to LWN subscribers, and in the hope that they will use it to spread the word about their favorite LWN articles."
I spread the word about my favorite article in the hope this will attract new subscribers to LWN.net .
Why not wait a week until it is generally available?
If a small percentage of LWN subscribers would post their favorite articles to well-read sites, it would quickly defeat the incentive to subscribe to LWN.
Anyway, the main point is: LWN is great, if you like it, consider joining ;).
I'm also an LWN subscriber (via my company), but I really don't think this is an abuse. It's great to see LWN and LWN articles getting occasional attention here.
Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.
As long as the posting of subscriber links in places like this is occasional, I believe it serves as good marketing for LWN - indeed, every now and then, I even do it myself.
Personally, I get lots of mileage out of my LWN subscription-they do great reporting, and they try very hard to avoid sensationalism. If you work with Linux professionally, and you like Hacker News, you'll probably appreciate LWN.
OO in C can be uglier than in C++ but there's one big advantage: an object can use a mix of functions from different "classes" instead of pointing to a fixed vtable. An object can decide to build its own vtable and patch in optimized member functions.
Agreed. Explicitly created vtables in C are much more flexible than implicit vtables provided by C++ for classes containing virtual functions.
It is easy to patch vtable functions by optimized implementations on the fly either on a per-class or per-object basis.
How does C's version compare to the approach in C++ of using composition (instead of inheritance) to combine several objects into one?
I guess C allows finer-grained "monkey patching" of one function pointer?
Yes, I think the main difference is that run-time changes are allowed. C++ composition and things like mixins using templates allow combining without inheriting but everything is statically typed at compile time.
Of course all this dynamic stuff and more is still possible in C++, in fact, C++ features could be used to build a better "dynamic patching" mechanism than C, so it's not really an argument against using C++ at all, I'm a big fan myself.
The interesting question remains whether C code, no matter what kind of feature is implemented, is inherently easier to maintain for a project like the Linux kernel.
Another interesting way to achieve object-orientedness in C can be found in libdispatch [1], the user space implementation of Apple's Grand Central Dispatch API. It makes use of the transparent_union GCC attribute [2], among other things, and is pretty heavy on macro usage. Cool stuff.
12 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 32.4 ms ] threadAs a sort of gesture to the community, they added a "Send a free link" option that allows readers to send an article to a friend or colleague before this one-week period ends. This feature was really a nice gesture towards the LWN community.
Clearly this feature now abused to send an article to a website with a large readership (since it is still in the one week subscriber-only period), which is really sad, given that LWN always had to put a lot of effort into generating enough income to compensate their authors.
So, if you like the depth and quality of the article, please consider becoming a subscriber. It's really affordable, and provides genuinely good Linux/Unix-related content.
Note: I am not affiliated with LWN, just a happy subscriber, sad to see a nice feature misused.
"This feature is made available as a service to LWN subscribers, and in the hope that they will use it to spread the word about their favorite LWN articles."
I spread the word about my favorite article in the hope this will attract new subscribers to LWN.net .
If a small percentage of LWN subscribers would post their favorite articles to well-read sites, it would quickly defeat the incentive to subscribe to LWN.
Anyway, the main point is: LWN is great, if you like it, consider joining ;).
Where is it appropriate to post a subscriber link?
Almost anywhere. Private mail, messages to project mailing lists, and blog entries are all appropriate. As long as people do not use subscriber links as a way to defeat our attempts to gain subscribers, we are happy to see them shared.
In the past, corbet has said that posting the occasional link to Hacker News is acceptable: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1966033
As long as the posting of subscriber links in places like this is occasional, I believe it serves as good marketing for LWN - indeed, every now and then, I even do it myself.
Personally, I get lots of mileage out of my LWN subscription-they do great reporting, and they try very hard to avoid sensationalism. If you work with Linux professionally, and you like Hacker News, you'll probably appreciate LWN.
Of course all this dynamic stuff and more is still possible in C++, in fact, C++ features could be used to build a better "dynamic patching" mechanism than C, so it's not really an argument against using C++ at all, I'm a big fan myself.
The interesting question remains whether C code, no matter what kind of feature is implemented, is inherently easier to maintain for a project like the Linux kernel.
[1] http://libdispatch.macosforge.org/
[2] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Type-Attributes.html