Gleason also talks about content moderation and blocking, saying: “One thing that has been holding the ActivityPub protocol back from achieving even more, is the blocking culture”
Now why exactly would Gleason have issues with blocking?
It’s because he’s a fucking card-carrying transphobe, and, like the article says, former CTO for truth.social, Trump’s social network.
Nobody should listen to anything this clown has to say.
One big, long-standing issue is that fish can’t run builtins, blocks or functions in the background or at the same time.
That means a pipeline like
will have to wait for the first while loop to complete, which takes 0.5s, and then run the second.
So it takes 0.5s until you get the first output and a full second until you get all of it.
Making this concurrent means you get the first line immediately and all of it in 0.5s.
While this is an egregious example, it makes all
builtin | builtin
pipelines slower.Other shells solve this via subshells - they fork off a process for the middle part of the pipeline at least. That has some downsides in that it’s annoyingly leaky - you can’t set variables or create a background job in those sections and then wait for them outside, because it’s a new process and so the outer shell never sees them.