The farebox recovery ratio in many western nations are not enough to ever fully fund public transport. In many cases, the systems to collect fares end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars. These costs are never made back. It makes sense to make it free.
I believe Bryant and O'Hallaron wrote a text book just for this course. You can always "optimize" it by reverse engineering the benchmark app and providing the correctly aligned blocks to the bench-marking application. It'll beat the standard malloc calls by several magnitudes if you were to do that.
This is one of the reasons why people write custom allocators - to suit a specific purpose where the allocation pattern is known well in advance.
> A lot of people forget that the G in GTK stands for Gimp
Source? It's always stood for Gnome Toolkit. You must be confusing this with the GDK (GIMP Drawing Kit) that's between the library layer and the display server. The GDK is part of the toolkit.
- Fields, or anything that uses fields: They're completely broken. They only seem to function in straight-forward case. For e.g: it's very easy for sequences to completely go off whack.
- File comparisons: this feature can only tolerate up to a certain number of pages. It will crash and burn for large documents. I sometimes wonder why this is even offered!
- Formatting: No matter how carefully paragraph spacing etc. is controlled there are always instances where things won't work as intended. A good example is cover pages.
- Hanging and freezing on large documents while Word figures out how to render them.
- Font rendering: it's never great. It never looks the same as what it would on a printer (irrespective of the printer). The Mac version does a decent job, but the Windows version, even with ClearType configured, is not great.
- Lastly, my biggest issue: feature incompatibilities between the versions of Word available on Mac and Windows. The Mac version (the latest O365) release doesn't have a lot of advanced features that are available on Windows such as document signing and style breaks.
For any serious writing, Microsoft Word is one of the worst pieces of tools out there. It starts showing its ugly side when start using anything remotely advanced.