I mean, I love eBPF more than most, but this is a practical engineering solution to a logistical problem that didn't really need to exist in the first place.
This is not genius and not an order-of-magnitude improvement to an important computer science problem; it's an improvement to a costly artifact of the Linux kernel.
As someone who works with BPF every day, I don’t think comparing orders of magnitude is right. It just enables things that can be done now that you wouldn’t dream of doing before. I think a good analogy is going from horse drawn carriages to the automobile. In a carriage going from Boston to New York would be a multi day journey that you would have to plan for weeks in advance. With a car you just get in and go. BPF is like that, suddenly you have all these options for things that you can do instantly, that you’d only do before if you were ready to dedicate years to getting support into the kernel. It’s a superpower for kernel development.
I mean, I love eBPF more than most, but this is a practical engineering solution to a logistical problem that didn't really need to exist in the first place.
This is not genius and not an order-of-magnitude improvement to an important computer science problem; it's an improvement to a costly artifact of the Linux kernel.