GNU Shepherd 0.8 Released As An Alternative To Systemd

[jrdoane]

Yeah, I have heard about them, I just don't use them.

As a dev that uses Clojure, I'll confirm that it has some really nice features. Homoiconicity, pervasive immutability, and good concurrency and mutable state constructs just to name a couple, forget that you have the entire JVM ecosystem under the hood. Dev'ing with a REPL and good IDE integration is fantastic. Honestly, learning Clojure changed the way I write software in other languages and I would recommend it to anyone with a passion to learn.

[tildearrow]

Yeah?

Maybe he can code in GNU Guile, but I can't, and I don't know anyone personally that can.

GNU is stuck in the '60-'90's. That is the actual problem.

[starshipeleven]

And that means...?

probably that he has issues understanding the concept that people different from him exist

[ssokolow]

As a dev that uses Clojure, I'll confirm that it has some really nice features. Homoiconicity, pervasive immutability, and good concurrency and mutable state constructs just to name a couple, forget that you have the entire JVM ecosystem under the hood. Dev'ing with a REPL and good IDE integration is fantastic. Honestly, learning Clojure changed the way I write software in other languages and I would recommend it to anyone with a passion to learn.

Homoiconicity is definitely something you don't find very often outside Lisps, but the rest, I'd probably turn to Rust for. I've always wanted to find a more practical balance between comfortable coding and having a very thin abstraction between the language model and the machine model. (And a garbage-collected VM is a thick abstraction, especially if you're doing anything where things like escape analysis are relevant to meeting your goals. Sure, undefined behaviour isn't a giant concern like in C or C++, but becoming skilled in knowing how to avoid falling off a particular VM's fast path is not something I enjoy.)

Rust may be verbose, but that verbosity really constrains where you can fall off the "fast enough" path without getting a compile-time error... especially if you're willing to not rely on auto-vectorization and explicitly use SIMD when you want "vectorized or compile failure".

[jacob]

The one thing I would never have expected from those who are against systemd is to come up with a PID1 written in a language that allows self-modifying code and requires a garbage collector.

[jrdoane]

Homoiconicity is definitely something you don't find very often outside Lisps, but the rest, I'd probably turn to Rust for. I've always wanted to find a more practical balance between comfortable coding and having a very thin abstraction between the language model and the machine model. (And a garbage-collected VM is a thick abstraction, especially if you're doing anything where things like escape analysis are relevant to meeting your goals. Sure, undefined behaviour isn't a giant concern like in C or C++, but becoming skilled in knowing how to avoid falling off a particular VM's fast path is not something I enjoy.)

Rust may be verbose, but that verbosity really constrains where you can fall off the "fast enough" path without getting a compile-time error... especially if you're willing to not rely on auto-vectorization and explicitly use SIMD when you want "vectorized or compile failure".

If I had a problem that was very performance sensitive, I'd probably fallback on writing just that piece in Java. I don't use Clojure because it's the fastest language to execute. I use it because it's fast to write and it performs well for what it offers. As with all languages, I think it really depends on what you're doing when it comes to what would be the best fit. With that said though, that isn't to say that there isn't a benefit to learning what a Lisp is all about and Clojure provides a really nice modern take on it.

[AndyChow]

Isn't it more highlighting problems in the dbus spec because any application can pretend to be another application?

Aren't we talking about exactly the same people? geoclue depends on dbus depends on systemd?

[pal666]

I would suspect any competitor or future replacement

it's not competitor. systemd is linux basesystem, shepherd is service manager. it's competitor for dozen of projects nobody uses

[pal666]

I don't know about Shepherd, but it usually takes a couple of minutes to write an init script

broken init script. nobody needs your broken init scripts

[pal666]

And a garbage-collected VM is a thick abstraction, especially if you're doing anything where things like escape analysis are relevant to meeting your goals. Sure, undefined behaviour isn't a giant concern like in C or C++

garbage collection doesn't protect against undefined behavior, it only protects against memleaks. btw, neither c nor c++ have undefined behavior by definition. if your program exhibits undefined behavior, then it's program in some different language and you are trying to fool your compiler(which isn't very smart thing to do). and you can have garbage collection in c++. but you don't need it, because in c++ you can avoid generation of garbage