Top all-time · #7285
Rémi Denis-Courmont
Personal blog · remlab.net/opprogrammingsystems
Rémi Denis-Courmont's personal blog at remlab.net covers programming and systems. Since 2009, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 11 times, most often “I hate Xlib”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link this blog as a source on non-blocking file I/O, Xlib versus XCB, and the VLC 1.0 release. The comments cite the posts without judging their quality.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- I hate Xlib3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-10-16
What Hacker News says?
I'm referring to `fcntl(fd, F_SETFL, flags | O_NONBLOCK)`. `stat`, `open` are blocking, yes, didn't think about that. Also according to [1] file operations will always block, even in non-blocking mode, so I was wrong, sorry. 1: https://www.remlab.net/op/nonblock.shtml
Comment linking /op/nonblock.shtml
on “Thread Pools in Nginx Boost Performance 9x (2015)”Submitted I hate Xlib as a story · 58 points
HN discussionFor VLC: apparently this version 1.0 is effectively not a special release, a "major version, with long time support". 1.0 just comes after 0.99. However, quoting one of the developer blog: "After the longest feature freeze stabilization period in the project's history, VLC 1.0.0-final is coming at last..." ( http://www.remlab.net/ ). In general case: for me "version 1.0 not beta" means "we give you the insurance tha…
Comment linking /
on “VLC Media Player 1.0.0 is finally out”Submitted I hate Xlib and so should you as a story · 33 points
HN discussionXcb is lighter. It requires less message bouncing back and forth. It is also simpler, and should yield less bugs. Xlib is terrible and should be avoided whether possible[0]. Everything else being equal, Xcb should be faster. This is true on current hardware, or on an Amiga 1200 with a 68030 accelboard like the one I have right next to me. The difference is actually dramatic[1]. [0]: https://www.remlab.net/op/xlib.sh…
Comment linking /op/xlib.shtml
on “Default window manager switched to CTWM in NetBSD-current”Submitted I hate Xlib and so should you as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThat's very, very, very strange. I've been running IPv6 (first through a tunnelbroker.net tunnel, and -much- later using native IPv6 through Comcast) for roughly eight years now. Haven't had any issue with Linux, Mac, or Windows systems. To diagnose a thing, what happens when you disable Router Advertisements on your router, then enable IPv6 on a machine, and run Teredo [0] on that machine? (After Teredo assigns an…
Comment linking /miredo/
on “Ipv6 traffic just shy of 10% of total”Submitted Miredo: Teredo IPv6 Tunneling for Linux and BSD as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Conditional variable with futex as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Why (not) to relicense VLC under LGPL? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The Pointless Sizeof Discussion as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
