GNOME Might Need To Crack Down On Their JavaScript Extensions

[tildearrow]

you simply look at for example some Rust code and see these words and know to get the fuck out of there:

let mut

Every time I see "let" it makes me think Rust was influenced by BASIC.

[ssokolow]

And really? How is

let mut x: i32 = 5;

really any different from

int x = 5;

other than that you explicitly define if it's mutable or not? You're giving the compiler more info so it can better catch any mistakes or slip ups you make. Nobody's perfect, and that kind of thing helps a lot with catching errors down the road.

Two points you didn't mention which should be mentioned to be more fair to Rust:

1. You don't usually need the : i32 because i32 is what untyped integer literals default to in the absence of other inferred constraints.
2. You could also ask how const int x = 5; is better than let x = 5; in the common case of values not intended to be modified.

[Sniperfox47]

lol at all these "modern language" fanboys. You also forgot D.

Why don't you guys bash Vulkan too? Stick with OpenGL eh? Vulkan too low level, too hard for some people's mental capacity, just like with C it's too hard to reason with pointers properly and clean after their own. Oh, I get it, it's because Vulkan is "newer" than OpenGL, while C is not a "new" language. I get it, if C was new it would be the best language ever eh?

Honestly, even ignoring any and all technical stuff about C/C++ vs other inferior languages, you simply look at for example some Rust code and see these words and know to get the fuck out of there:

let mut

Eh C/C++ have their place but that place is not high level application development. A good C++ program may be better than a good (picking random "safe" language) python program, but a good python program is both easier to make and better than a crappy C++ program. Even experienced developers make mistakes now and again, and C++ is *not* a language that's friendly to mistakes. More modern low level languages like Go and Rust make it harder to develop bad applications (once you learn to use them of course).

And really? How is

let mut x: i32 = 5;

really any different from

int x = 5;

other than that you explicitly define if it's mutable or not? You're giving the compiler more info so it can better catch any mistakes or slip ups you make. Nobody's perfect, and that kind of thing helps a lot with catching errors down the road.

[ssokolow]

That is a valid reason not to switch from wordpress if you want comments or want people to see them! Some of us block Disqus unconditionally simply because it is so commonly used as to turn it into a potential cross-site tracker. I have literally never seena Disqus comment as I have never once unblocked them.

*nod* I only unblock Disqus temporarily on specific posts and have uMatrix's cookie-blocking and a user-agent randomizer to help out. My plan is to write something that is essentially a self-hostable Disqus clone similar to how Piwik is a self-hostable alternative to Google Analytics... Ideally with support for...

1. Baking comments which pass moderation into the static HTML each time the site gets regenerated so that they wind in Git alongside the post for SEO, archival, and page-load performance. (Possibly baked in anonymously, with post IDs used to look up the nicknames and such on JavaScript load so GDPR compliance doesn't require rewriting git history.)
2. Support for a degraded but functional experience with JavaScript disabled using an iframe to display comments not yet baked in and Reply links which load a whole new page.
3. A combination of novel approaches to anti-spam that have worked beautifully on other sites of mine. (eg. Refusing to accept comments containing the strings </a>, [/url], or [/link] with a 200 OK response and a human-readable "Please switch to a bare URL and resubmit" message has dropped the spam on http://gbindex.ssokolow.com/contact down to one spam message per year... which only gets through that check because the spambot is so broken that the post contains nothing but a nonsense word like "srpgvsre" and, thus, doesn't serve a spammer's goals. I'll probably block those by adding something like a 10-character minimum post length and/or by adding a URL field like WordPress has, but hidden by CSS and used as a honeypot. My WordPress spam bin has some very funny examples, such as one spambot which likes to send me the raw source to the template it's supposed to be using to generate spam.)

[ssokolow]

Honestly, even ignoring any and all technical stuff about C/C++ vs other inferior languages, you simply look at for example some Rust code and see these words and know to get the fuck out of there:

let mut

I'm probably going to regret asking, but what's so bad about let mut?

[Weasel]

lol at all these "modern language" fanboys. You also forgot D.

Why don't you guys bash Vulkan too? Stick with OpenGL eh? Vulkan too low level, too hard for some people's mental capacity, just like with C it's too hard to reason with pointers properly and clean after their own. Oh, I get it, it's because Vulkan is "newer" than OpenGL, while C is not a "new" language. I get it, if C was new it would be the best language ever eh?

Honestly, even ignoring any and all technical stuff about C/C++ vs other inferior languages, you simply look at for example some Rust code and see these words and know to get the fuck out of there:

let mut

[cybertraveler]

I have literally never seena Disqus comment as I have never once unblocked them.

Same.

[Luke]

[*]Writing an alternative to migrating all of my comments into Disqus. (I put a high value on supporting in-page comments, even if I only get them infrequently.)[/LIST]

That is a valid reason not to switch from wordpress if you want comments or want people to see them! Some of us block Disqus unconditionally simply because it is so commonly used as to turn it into a potential cross-site tracker. I have literally never seena Disqus comment as I have never once unblocked them.

[cybertraveler]

Wayland was a big mistake. Display server and window manager in one big bloated thing, let every window manager implement its own flawed versions of the protocol that applications have to use (even for the basic stuff) ? No thanks.

You don't have to make it as one big bloated thing. You can have most of the window management functions in completely separate process to the compositor. You could also have a separate process for the desktop panels / widges.

Also: you don't have to make your own display server implementation:
1) there are already shared components of a wayland desktop being used by multiple Wayland Servers (eg libwayland and the widely used libinput)
2) as the various display servers mature it seems very probable to me that desktops will borrow Wayland compositors from external projects to build upon. Just like how Gnome 3 borrowed the Firefox Javascript JIT interpreted as opposed to writing their own.

[cybertraveler]

As a whole I really wish that open source developers would move away from the world of C and onto a modern language. My feelings about C++ are mixed, it has been greatly improved in recent times but it has plenty of dark areas. Apples Swift is really grabbing my attention and frankly I'd like to see it explored more fully to implement open source software in the future. I like that Swift in many ways has the feel of an interpreted language, yet delivers the speed of many compiled languages.

So yeah I have to agree if the GNOME team wants to impress me, start using languages like C++/Rust or Swift. Build your software so that it has a long future and is maintainable and understandable by many. By the way I know that Rust and Swift are not really ready for prime time. In an ideal world both would be standardized much in the way C or C++ have been.

Also, remember Golang! Compiled, fast, typed and modern. Also it's very popular. However, it is garbage collected.