Re: GnuTLS considered harmful

[Howard Chu <hyc@symas.com>]

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> In the end, this is about economics and trade-offs.  While the code is
> technically sometimes both inefficient and inelegant, there are too few
> people who work on it to make re-writing code a good use of our time.
> If GnuTLS was a larger and funded project like OpenSSL, NSS, or
> OpenLDAP, things may be different.

I'll note that when I embarked on performance analysis of OpenLDAP back in 
2001, http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-devel/200109/msg00065.html all of 
my work was funded by my bank account. There was pretty much no commercial 
interest in OpenLDAP until several years later, long after our major 
performance overhauls were done. After we had consistently demonstrated that 
the rewritten codebase performed better than anything else out there. The 
Project's growth didn't really accelerate until after that groundwork was done.

If you don't build a tight foundation you can't build anything good on top. If 
you don't build the foundation yourself, no one will ever care to fund you to 
add anything else. Just my opinion of course.
--
  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.  http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun        http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP     http://www.openldap.org/project/