Linus Torvalds Quotes

I wanted to have virtual memory, at least as it's coupled with file systems.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

In C there are no data structures: there are pointers and pointer arithmetic. So you have a pointer into a data structure.

Well, hey, let's just make everything into a closure, and then we'll have our general garbage collector, installed by 'use less memory'.

Any given program will expand to fill all available memory.

Caches aren't architecture, they're just optimization.

The orthogonal features, when combined, can explode into complexity.

I think it killed the performance on a lot of the systems in the Labs for years because everyone had their own copy of it, but it wasn't being shared, and so they wasted huge amounts of memory back when memory was expensive.

I think complexity is mostly sort of crummy stuff that is there because it's too expensive to change the interface.

Simple systems are not feasible because they require infinite testing.

In computer animation, every detail has to be thought out, designed, modeled, shaded, placed and lit. The more you add, the more computer memory you need.

Zero-length arrays are useful only in cases where you have a large structure, which contains a field of dynamic length, and you need to share that structure across program or even computer boundaries.

Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

One of the obvious things that went wrong with Multics as a commercial success was just that it was sort of over-engineered in a sense. There was just too much in it.

Memory is funny. Once you hit a vein the problem is not how to remember but how to control the flow.

There will never be a day where the depth of integration, unless it was all built from the bottom ground up, will be integrated as any of us would like.

Ever since I learned about the concept of garbage collection in 6.001 at MIT in 1984 while using Scheme on HP Chipmunks, I've always thought of dreaming as the same as garbage collection for a computer.

DOS is ugly and interferes with users' experience.

The belief that complex systems require armies of designers and programmers is wrong. A system that is not understood in its entirety, or at least to a significant degree of detail by a single individual, should probably not be built.

RAM: This gives guys a way of deciding whose computer has the biggest, studliest memory. That's important, because the more memory a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages.

The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build.

The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management

There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

It is also possible within this lifetime to enhance the power of the mind, enabling one to reaccess memories from previous lives. Such recollection tends to be more accessible during meditative experiences in the dream state. Once one has accessed memories of previous lives in the dream state, one gradually recalls them in the waking state.

There's no point in comparing an actual, operating system with an ideal system that doesn't exist.