A shell function beats a tool you have to install

write-uptools · 17 points · 16 comments

For the JSON diff question: I stopped installing things and wrote four lines that pipe both files through a normaliser and then diff.

It is worse than the tools in every way except the one that matters, which is that it is there on every machine I log into and it does exactly the thing I asked for.

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16 comments

2026-10-14
Two years ago I would have argued. Having since maintained one of these, I would not.
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2026-10-14
The part people skip is the last paragraph, which is the whole argument.
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2026-10-14
Counterexample: on a read-heavy workload we measured the opposite. Happy to write it up if useful.
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2026-10-14
Reading this made me go and check ours, and ours was wrong. So: thank you, and also, ugh.
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2026-10-14
What did you use to measure it?
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2026-10-14
A trace, not a profiler. The profiler said the function was fast, which it was.
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2026-10-14
This matches what the errata says, which almost nobody reads.
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2026-10-14
Filed under things I will rediscover in eighteen months and be annoyed about.
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2026-10-14
The naming point generalises. Half our bugs are a name answering a different question than its value.
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2026-10-14
Is there a version of this that works when the window is not fixed?
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2026-10-14
Yes, but it costs a second index and I would not do it under a million rows.
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2026-10-14
I disagree with the framing but not the conclusion, which is an odd place to end up.
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2026-10-14
Small correction: it is the fifth most recent, not the fifth oldest. Took me a minute.
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2026-10-14
Fixed, thank you. That was a real error and not a typo.
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2026-10-14
This is the one I was looking for last week. Thank you.
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2026-10-14
Worth adding that this only holds if the clock is monotonic. Ours was not, and the failure looked exactly like a slow disk.
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