The crisis in systems code maintenance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Linguistic support for modern programming paradigms has not been welcomed into most of today's mainstream operating systems. Linus Torvalds has decreed that Linux will never again entertain C++, saying In fact, in Linux we did try C++ once already, back in 1992. It sucks. Trust me, writing kernel code in C++ is a bloody stupid idea Similarly, Pantelis Antoniou, an embedded PowerPC kernel developer, has captured popular systems-sentiment about aspect-orientation, People like to live in denial; thinking that programming shouldn't be this hard right? There must be an easier way, if only those pesky developers followed fashionable_methodology_of_the_day As a consequence, though a number of systems have been progressively restructuring services to leverage higher-level paradigms, it is intentionally done without language support. This decoupling of paradigms and language mechanisms appears to suggest that conventional wisdom in the systems community prejudices modern programming methodologies because they may unnecessarily heavyweight manifestations of paradigms, and pollute otherwise elegant and optimized hand-crafted C code. Simply put, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. We believe there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that, if the systems community continues to refuse support for a paradigm shift, system evolution will slow down to an unacceptable level. Already, valuable code is not being integrated into systems in a timely fashion because the tools meant to facilitate this can, and often do, impede the process. Simply put, it is broke and we believe we know how to fix it.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.032 | 0.109 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.027 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".