On suckless software
Warning: this article is not purely technical. Opinions, reasoning and contradictions are present.
Conflict of interests is terrible thing. It is very unpleasant, when there are two principles that you follow and some day you encounter subject on which they contradict. It happened with me and software.
First, and primary requirement on software must be free. No exceptions. But there is another consideration. With everything else equal, GPL is better then BSD/MIT/other-non-copyleft-junk. GPLv2+ is better then GPLv2 and so on. But what about cases, where not everything else is equal?
Lets compare GNU Screen (v.4.2.1) and tmux(v2.1) – last released version at time of writing. Screen is GPLv3+, tmux is BSD-3-clause. On my personal experience, tmux is slightly simpler to use. Also, it have feature to number panes starting with 1. Implementing it in Screen is rather complicated and fragile. With all this, Screen contains 40015 lines of Ansi C code, tmux – 34859. And in my opinion, tmux codebase is simpler to understand. Not a dealmaker? Right, read on.
Some time ago I learned about [suckless.org]. It is better to just quote their philosophy:
Designing simple and elegant software is far more difficult than
letting ad-hoc or over-ambitious features obscure the code over
time. However one has to pay this price to achieve reliability
and maintainability. Furthermore, minimalism results in
reasonable and attainable goals. We strive to maintain minimalism
and clarity to drive development to completion.
And I was convinced, that most software I use is really bloated. Lets continue the terminal multiplexer theme and consider dvtm-0.12, present in Debian jessie. With configuration at build time, it manages to deliver same functionality as tmux or GNU Screen, within 3925 lines of code. Latest version, v0.15 have even less lines of code – 3848. One can blame me, that I am too concerned with lines counting. In other cases I would agree, that ~100 lines difference is nothing. But let me tell you what was under hood. Version 0.12 implemented what tmux calls copy-mode itself – movement, selection and so on. Version 0.15 dropped it in favor of pipe: pipe all terminal history to external process, read it’s output and here is paste buffer. Brilliant solution in unix way.
But real revelation was text editor sandy. It is about ~2500 lines of code, which I can understand within several minutes. I always belived, that text editor is a beast of extereme complexity, like emacs with over a million lines of lisp code or vim with 300k lines of C code with load of conditional compilation. Why the hell support some shitty proprietary operating system that is not POSIX-complaint? No doubt, suckless software is not for everyone. By design, it is for advanced users.
Here is contradiction. From my point of view, suckless is really superior from techincal point of view and inferior from political. What matters more?
Here is my answer for myself. There is nothing wrong with using and improving free, but not copyleft software, although copyleft one would be better. Many blame GNU Software for beeing bloated, but let me advocate us [1]. GNU is how it all started. Free software started with GNU Manifesto, Emacs, gcc and gdb. Many GNU projects are first of their kind in free world. Bash, GCC, Screen, GDB, Coreutils – they all was first, and it is hard to be first. Every subsequent project was able to use wisdom of it’s ancestors mistakes. GNU mistakes. History is never kind to us.
And there is another consideration. GNU’s priority is freedom of users. And most of them will never write a line of C. If you ever set up a GNU/Linux system for a person, who can’t even invoke apt-get install in command line, you know that is is much, much harder, than setup for yourself. GNU, and many other “bloated” programs attempts to make happy as much non-programmers, as possible. It has it’s price, huge price, that suckless project refuses to pay. I no longer beleive that one day everyone will be GNU/Linux hacker, so there always will have to be someone to pay this price.
I take my hat off to developers, who is proficent with command line and scripting, but still volonter developing projects like Evolution, Dolphin or Gmpc. Sorry, but I do not have willpower to develop something I will not use. All I can do is diplomacy and release everything I create under GPLv3+.
| [1] | After all, I consider myself member of GNU, although I was not too active recently. |