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by returningfory2
817 days ago
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I think the idea in this comment -- that users of languages inherit all of the perceived negatives of the community developing the language -- is just wrong. (I say "perceived" because some of the claims in this post are simply incorrect, such as the claim the Rust language developers think "backwards compatibility may actually be considered an anti-goal".) For example, over the last couple of years I've been re-implementing some of Knuth's typesetting work in Rust. Contrary to your claim, my project is obsessed with backwards compatibility and making sure the output is identical to Knuth's. Last weekend I even discovered a ~30-year old bug in one of Knuth's programs [1] as part of an extensive fuzzing effort. (Of course, I re-implemented Knuth's bug in my Rust code [2].) [1] https://tug.org/pipermail/tex-k/2024-March/004031.html
[2] https://github.com/jamespfennell/texcraft/commit/e89b7461780... |
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That being said, though, for any major project, it's hard to overstate the long-term effect of community pressure. I maintain a moderately-sized project using Gtk for its GUI, and am personally deeply opposed to the RHEL blob (which Gtk/Gnome belongs to)'s culture of "windowsification"/switching away from simple composable interfaces to overengineered proprietary ones. Yet, recently contributors successfully browbeat me into switching the config system from a legible textual one to gsettings (basically Gtk's implementation of the Win32 registry, with all this implies) - it was just too much pressure over what seemed like an ultimately minor thing, and I didn't want to alienate people who I depend on for a lot of work that being well-embedded in the wider community conveys competitive advantage in, such as getting packages into distro repositories. I'm left wondering what principles/preferences I would not compromise on, if the resident Gnome wizards were to all disagree. If your project grew so large that you couldn't do without the help of random Rust community members, and the majority of them got very insistent that you should not reproduce Knuth's idiosyncrasies, can you say with confidence that you would resist?