261–270 of 324 posts
> I'm not so sure about the openness of D-lang so I've left it out D is the most open language you will find. It is Boost licensed, which has the least restrictions of any language you'll find: https://www.boost.org/users/license.html The compiler is 100% Boost licensed. Nobody pays me a dime for D.
> I'm not so sure about the openness of D-lang so I've left it out D is the most open language you will find. It is Boost licensed, which has the least restrictions of any language you'll find: https://www.boost.org/users/license.html The compiler is 100% Boost licensed. Nobody pays me a dime for D.
(The one and only WalterBright! What an honour.) Terribly sorry about that. I've moved you into the list. It's been a long time now but I really did like D and its meta-programming features.
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I agree, but I do think that you have to think of the ecosystem of the language if the major cooperation steps away or dials back, maybe thinking of them more like 'dependency'. Go lived through community alone, how well will twitters projects hold up without their involvement because I imagine it's not very lean for twitter to spend time on. I think this argument is better had for frameworks and JavaScript libs. Hav…
This is the real threat. So much “open source” technology is just free community editions of closed source software. If any of these companies decide to change course for any reason, you’re screwed. Who’s going to pick it up? You? No, you were coasting along on someone else work, you don’t have a good expertise or slack to support it. But someone who law will right? Nah. They’ll just shrug and pivot, as will you. May…
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I work for Google now on an open source project, and have worked on open source language projects for them before. This is just not how things happen. At all. There's a lot of fear in our post about things that _could_ happen, but haven't actually happened in Google's history, or aren't unique to corporate sponsorship. > 1. I wouldn't be able to refuse if they told me to add tracking, analytics, AI "learning", or loc…
> Google just doesn't do this with OSS projects. So, android being an open source project, how does one turn off these nefarious repeated connectivity checks (phoning home)? Or how does one modify `/etc/hosts` like we do on Linux? Why do we have to go all the way to root the device or use a different OS to achieve these? - https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
Developer tools are different.
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The economics of independently lead open source is still a problem with no solutions in sight. The economics for corporate controlled open source are quite clear. It's a cost saver for corporations to open source solutions to common problems. This gets others to buy in, which spreads maintenance costs and ensures that no one is seriously winning in the domain of the project. Essentially de-risking cost/benefits in th…
I’d also like to throw another counter example out. C# and Typescript from Microsoft are both excellent languages and are led by Anders Hejlsberg.
Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.
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Yes: new management can't un-open-source something. If it's out there, it's out there. They could close future work, but not existing work.
If they employ the core team, and own the immaterial rigths, they could 1. Make next version propietary, or particially propietary 2. Keep updating the closed version, no more core team for open version 3. After some time the open version is too oudated, too far behind the propietary version 4. Ambiquity on lisencing also deteriorates intrest For examples see, Qt, MySql, Java
My response to the plea in this article is simply "No thanks." If Go gets that bad, I'd be happy to use an ungoogled fork of it, or migrate to another toolchain or language, or whatever needs to happen. But until then, I'm not going to preemptively switch ecosystems and banish technically good options from my tool belt because I have fears about what could happen. I want production quality toolchain and runtimes. Tha…
Maybe we should be investing more time into creating meta-platforms so that we don't need millions of dollars to bootstrap production-ready languages.
GraalVM has Truffle, which is an API for creating languages. If you use it, you get a lot of features for "free". All you have to do is write an AST interpreter. I wrote about it a long time ago here:
https://blog.plan99.net/graal-truffle-134d8f28fb69
Misc things you get:
• Advanced JIT compiler with support for static and dynamic typing, multiple CPU archs.
• Advanced multi-threaded portable runtime.
• Several cutting edge garbage collectors (you don't have to use them).
• Native standalone single binary for your language's interpreter/jit.
• Interop with other languages! (call into js, python, ruby, java, kotlin etc).
• Can also call into WebAssembly and native code compiled with LLVM, your JIT will optimize across the boundary.
• Can implement your language stdlib in any other language (see interop) meaning programs written in your language run on every major OS out of the box.
• Profiling support.
• Debugger support (chrome devtools).
• Sandboxing.
• Heap snapshotting.
• Code coverage support.
• Some Language Server Protocol support.
Probably more I forgot about already. It's really a pretty amazing generalization of the JVM and drops the cost of creating competitive new languages through the floor. IDE integration is the weakest part, but as you're writing your AST interp in Java, making a converter to the IntelliJ PSI AST API isn't much more work so an IntelliJ plugin would be easy. And IntelliJ is itself open source so you can fork it to make a dedicated language IDE if you want.
the article seems to be mainly about Go, but iirc Amazon now employs most of the Rust steering committee, so much so that there was an ex contributor complaining about it a while ago. Java used to be backed by Sun Microsystems, but now it's really open source. Nowadays (iirc) Oracle and Red Hat are the main contributors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_... . I disagree that Java is an Open language. Experience says otherwise.
> remember when programming languages were free? This is actually the golden age of free programming languages. Previously, if you wanted a high quality compiler, you had to either get it from the vendor of your operating system or license one for a lot of money. Now, you have access to multiple high-quality compilers. In addition, even if you had a free compiler, you would have to pay for floppy disks or a cd-rom. N…
All the tooling we get nowadays for granted was insanely expensive.