Glad to hear this. ffmpeg is one of these "Too Important to Fail" libraries. I'll lay odds that billions of dollars rely on it, and it's an open-source tool.
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Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
21–30 of 55 posts
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#22[flagged]
What on earth would that accomplish?
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Serious question, let's say you had a ton of money and wanted to get this done, is there physically enough available Rust talent (at market rates) in the world today to port ffmpeg to rust in any reasonable amount of time? My understanding is that it's one of the biggest open source projects in terms of LoC, development hours needed to both create and maintain, and number of former and active developers working on th…
There definitely is. You don't need support for all the obscure formats that ffmpeg supports. It would still cost a lot though.
Perhaps you don't need it. But that doesn't mean a lot of others find them very useful.
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#24[flagged]
Have you ever rewritten a project in a completely different language?
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#25This is great news, but simultaneously disappointing that it is necessary. FFmpeg underpins tens of billions of dollars in value for the companies that use it, yet the support from the community is proportionally minuscule.
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#26It's very good that ffmpeg gets support and the sovereign tech fund is a good idea but for me it again just highlights how perverted the incentives to support open source are. Millions of dollars are extracted by using ffmpeg from a lot of corporations, yet the German taxpayer pays for maintenance.
Finally my taxes are put to good use for once
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#27[flagged]
For an enormous project like this, it is probably more reasonable to just use the latest version of C, and turn on lots of linters and sanitizers. You could also use one of the various strict subsets of C that is oriented for safety. Might as well tell people to rewrite WebKit or Linux in Rust. There are projects that aim at building browsers or kernels in Rust, but the man-millennia of effort put into the existing p…
What other big projects like Chromium and Android are doing is writing new code in Rust and investing in interop with the existing C and C++ code, along with fuzzing and sanitizing.
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#28Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#29[flagged]
Have you ever rewritten a project in a completely different language?
To be fair, ffmpeg is highly modular, some parts of it are probably already in Rust. I feel like rewriting certain extremely high-use libraries like libx264 could be done if like, 5 really productive Rust engineers with codec experience took it on for 12 months.
I’m not saying it’s needed, just that ffmpeg is the kind of thing that could be rewritten gradually if there was interest and a lot of dedicated talent.
Re: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
#30[flagged]
Serious question, let's say you had a ton of money and wanted to get this done, is there physically enough available Rust talent (at market rates) in the world today to port ffmpeg to rust in any reasonable amount of time? My understanding is that it's one of the biggest open source projects in terms of LoC, development hours needed to both create and maintain, and number of former and active developers working on th…
There's plenty of talented developers out there that are currently working in another language, but could relatively quickly learn the required Rust skills to go work on such a project. Domain knowledge (codecs, video/audio processing, etc) is probably a bigger problem.