This is about installing on a Nexus 5 which is from 2013. Sounds painful.

Does gnu bc have outstanding bug reports? If not, it doesn’t need updates. Its spec was frozen 30 years ago, more or less. Rather than unmaintained, I’d call it maintenance-free. BIFL software as it were. Sounds great to me.

Seems like a whine, bc is an interactive tool and it’s unusual to use it for anything where its response isn’t instant.

GNU bc is one of the oldest GNU tools and it uses an MP library that RMS banged out in an afternoon or two, I think. It could probably be adapted to use GMP which is very high performance.

Preferring GPL to other licenses seems fine with me, unless I want to work for Amazon without getting paid.

I use autotools and don’t remember having such issues.

It sounds like he uses Rust and has some issues with it. IDK about green threads but Ada has had tasks (implemented in gnat with posix threads) from the beginning. If you pin a CPU core to a task and don’t use gc in it, that can handle your realtime stuff. Or these days, it’s becoming more common to use an fpga for cycle level timing control.

Note that traditional Forth cooperative multitaskers used a few hundred bytes of code or even less. This stuff doesn’t have to be bloaty.

Added: I’ve also seen a Boehm-style conservative GC in a few hundred lines of Forth. Using something like that in Rust could work nicely for lots of things.

Anyway, you can have a soft realtime gc with pauses in the low milliseconds (Erlang has that). That’s OOMs lower than most internet ping times, so plenty fast enough for web servers. Which are all full of JS bloat now regardless.

Yeah I had thought that C# was basically Microsoft’s version of Java, GC’d throughout. But it’s fine, I’m not particularly more excited by it now than I was before (i.e. unexcited). I’m not even excited by Rust, but maybe I’m missing something. I think it’s fine to use GC for most things, and program carefully in a non-allocating style when you have to, using verification tools as well.

A classic: http://james-iry.blogspot.com/2009/05/brief-incomplete-and-mostly-wrong.html

It’s not official or semi-official, it was just someone (a well known Haskell guru if that matters) speculating in a blog post.

https://chrisdone.com/posts/rust/

That is interesting and I didn’t know C# had anything like that. I saw another article recently saying at some point we were likely to see Rust get garbage collection.

should I completely jumpship to linux when windows 10 ends support

Nah, there’s no need to wait.

Here’s another Haskell example where I’d be interested to see a Rust counterpart. It’s a red-black tree implementation where the tree invariants are enforced by types. The code would less ugly with more recent GHC features, but same idea.

https://gist.github.com/rampion/2659812

https://old.reddit.com/comments/ti5il

Well if there isn’t already a Rust version on github, it could be cool to add one. A few other languages are already there.

Neat that looks interesting. There’s a similar Haskell idiom called session types. I have a bit of reservation about whether one can easily use Rust traits to mark out the permissible state sets that an operation can take, but that’s because I don’t know Rust at all. I do remember doing a hacky thing with TypeLits in Haskell to handle that. Basically you can have numbers in the type signatures and do some limited arithmetic with them at type level. I’d be interested to know if that is doable in Rust.

Things just weren’t like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.

Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn’t as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren’t really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.

Asded: PCs were an interesting target because there was a de facto open hardware standard, making the “PC compatible” industry possible. So again, without that, we would have used different hardware.

Thinkpad Yoga?

I’d like to see a Rust solution to Tony Morris’s tic tac toe challenge:

https://blog.tmorris.net/posts/scala-exercise-with-types-and-abstraction/index.html

His rant about it is here:

https://blog.tmorris.net/posts/understanding-practical-api-design-static-typing-and-functional-programming/

I did a Haskell GADT solution some time back and it’s supposed to be doable in Java and in C++. Probably Rust too. I wonder about Ada.

Does termux not already do this?

I’ll try to post a longer answer later but Rust is really for systems programming and its choices follow from that. I liked this article:

https://chrisdone.com/posts/rust/

Can anyone explain why Wayland exists or who cares about it? X has been around forever, it sucks but it works and everything supports it. Alternatives like NeWS came around that were radically better, but were too soon or relied too much on corporate support, so they faded. The GNU project originally intended to write its own thing, but settled for using X. Now there’s Wayland though, which seems like a slight improvement over X, but mostly kind of a lateral move.

If you’re going to replace X, why not do something a lot better? If not actual NeWS, then something that incorporates some of its ideas. I think Squeak was like that but I don’t know much about it.

Org mode has a time tracking feature, dunno about report generation.

Off the topic of my head, maybe these can get you started:

Hackers, by Stephen Levy

The Hacker Ethic, by Pekka Himanen

True Names, by Vernor Vinge

Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig

A Fire Upon The Deep (SF novel), by Vernor Vinge