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by SFjulie1 3855 days ago
well, donating to mozilla and not openSSL, freeBSD does not make a better internet.

Nowadays we have strictly NO LTS free/open source portable build chain of decent quality (compiler, linkers). (maybe also because of the norms)

When I say LTS compiler, I mean a compiler that can portably and reproducibly build code in C without flags on the CLI to the same exec and without developers having to archive their compiler every time compile to be sure to be able to build it once again with the same results.

You think this situation is not yet existing?

Hu hu hu hu hu ...

Houston, you have a problem.

Even though I appreciate LLVM/GCC, LLVM/GCC new major release may imply to patch specifically the C code for the $CC release.

And Ox flags may give weird unexpected results per compiler. And you may nowadays need GCC for some platform with specific code, and LLVM for others.

So how do we handle this complexity? The C code is less and less idempotent in time and architecture and performance...

How do we fully support long time support for reproducible multi platform build ?
2 comments
yeukhon 3855 days ago
LTS makes sense for an operating system. LTS doesn't make sense for utility. Actually, there is an LTS version of Firefox known as ESR [1]. You typically see this on university computers or some corporate machines. Personally, I don't see the value of ESR, because internal applications should be constantly improving, more and more machines are equipped with Chrome which AFAIK doesn't have ESR, and more and more corporate are giving out machines or allowing workers to tunnel in with VPN from personal workstation, the argument to actually continue to use ESR is diminishing IMO.

Anyway, I think you can create a thread to ask people to donate to other causes. That's fine.

[1]: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/faq/

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admax88q 3855 days ago
If C compilers are such a problem then developers should move to better languages. It's not the 70s anymore.
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SFjulie1 3855 days ago
No language other than C and FORTRAN have correct numerical libraries with a decent amount of speed.

Would you like the next plane that will make you travel to have the math done in javascript?

Would you like your pacemaker to fry 17W/h for a V8 engine and do you need mozilla embedded in it ?

Would you feel safe with nuclear plants control on the cloud?

Does a space probe rather needs support for an oauth2.0 or correct numerical analysis?

Don't you care that banking systems are correctly translating numerical amounts?

I mean computer are used for critical purpose too.

EDIT PS: numpy in python is binding on fortran libraries to do the job.

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cballard 3855 days ago
The idea of those things being built in a language without memory and good type safety (no ability to cast everything to void*) should terrify you.
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