Dave Plummer

And it never materialized.

But while they were working on it, one of the guys who was working on Cairo was kind of flaming on the open interface.

anti-dev alias, which is thousands of people, how shitty the anti-boot experience was.

And the response that came back was an epic flame that I wish I would have saved, and I won't name the guy who wrote it.

He knows who he is, but it was a work of art of angry flame mail.

Kind of like the ones you see Linus send every now and then about kernel stuff.

So it's a very similar sentiment.

Yeah, it got contentious.

So you've got intellects competing and eventually the technical merits for some people are secondary and it's about besting the other person in that argument.

And it's no longer productive at that point half the time, but there was a fair bit of that.

Yeah, I mean, there was one that I lost that still bugs me to this day, I think.

What's that?

Well, when we were doing the shell, we were porting everything from ANSI to Unicode.

So every character that was 8-bits now becomes 16-bits.

Now, the problem is I'm on a MIPS box because I'm porting it to RISC.

And you can't have unaligned addresses.

But if you take two ID lists, which are basically path components, you take the one for C colon backslash, take the one for Windows, take the one for system 32, and you add them together.

But if you've got an odd number of characters, now you're at an odd address in this thing.

And it takes me an immense amount of work to turn on exception handlers, to do unaligned byte access, to pull the string out and copy it manually.

It's literally like 100 to 1,000 times the amount of work to read a string out of this ID list.