[wkat4242]

Personally I stay away from Corp owned languages. Even cross platform ones like .net, Java and also swift. With the single commercial party owning it you never know if theyll close it, change things for the worse or get acquired by a hostile party which obviously happened to java :(

[vlovich123]

Which language would you classify as not corp owned?

It’s also weird to include Java and Swift in that list considering both afaik are maintained by a separate foundation. Java from Sun is even predominantly basically OpenJDK with some remaining proprietary Sun / Oracle bits but it’s the reference open source implementation used by most everyone.

[ndiddy]

> Java from Sun is even predominantly basically OpenJDK with some remaining proprietary Sun / Oracle bits but it’s the reference open source implementation used by most everyone.

Note that Oracle contributes around 90% of the work to OpenJDK. If they decided to stop working on it, there would be a big gap to fill.

[vlovich123]

That’s generally true of most languages. Rust is struggling with this right now.

I’d say though that Oracle is highly unlikely to stop working on Java and Google is still invested in the JDK even though they’re trying to shift new code in this space towards Kotlin (another “corp owned” language)

[burnermore]

Python, Zig, Elixir, JS, C to name a few?

[ladyanita22]

Also rust, c++

[vlovich123]

> Python, Zig, Elixir, JS, C to name a few?

For a significant portion of time Python was funded by Google, Meta and Facebook and maybe some other corps.

Zig doesn’t have any serious adoption in the industry yet but if/when it does I’d expect corps to be hiring the language devs.

JS is a consortium but it’s filled primarily with Google and Apple engineers.

Same goes for C/C++ lot of Apple, MS and Google engineers.

Elixir I’m not sure about. Rust was largely turns out employed by Amazon until the most recent culling.

It’s not surprising. This is technically difficult work and if the language is important to a corp they’ll hire the maintainers. There needs to be a funding source and in the industry that typically means a for profit company paying the salary of the people moving things forward. Indeed - it’s one of the things Rust is struggling with for now.

[burnermore]

They fund it cos they want to use it for their thing. Does not mean they own them. They are all community governed projects.

Rust, Julia, Typescript on the other hand are governed by Corps. They are not community projects.

Elixir is BDFL (good one) last I checked. Dont know if they became a company or foundation.

Zig is for all purposes a good example of community governed project. Itcs in production at Bun and TigerBeetle. But also, its not yet production ready (v1.0). So their current trend make sense.

But I could've been wrong with JS and C. Not sure about their governance now that I think about it.

[vlovich123]

This is patently wrong on at least several of these.

Rust is explicitly a community project having been born out of a non-profit, and if you’re discounting corp-funded but community driven that’s definitely Rust. If not, please indicate the corp that’s driving Rust.

Zig is a BDFL project like Python was (not sure how it is these days) - community contributes sure, but Andrew makes the big calls and directional changes.

[avhception]

I may be wrong, but I think what they meant was rather "funded mostly by a single corp". Bus factor.

[burnermore]

Nope. Rust is governed by corps. Its not a community project.

[timeon]

Sure, but slightly better than one corp.

One can argue about that - but probably not in context of the sub-thread:

> With the single commercial party owning it ...

[burnermore]

>Which language would you classify as not corp owned?

I would like to respectfully disagree with you there as well. The above was the context. I was replying to this which opened the conversation.

Not to mention, end users and consumers don't get a say in the corp funded projects. Everything works as long as it aligns with the goals of the corp. Not otherwise.

[vlovich123]

Which corps govern rust? I’m not aware.

[burnermore]

https://rustfoundation.org/members/

[MattDamonSpace]

Apple’s the exception that proves the rule, they do a fantastic job supporting legacy APIs, frameworks, and devices

[raw_anon_1111]

I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem in one form or the other 40 years and that’s definitely not true compared to Microsoft.

Most recently they dropped support for 32 bit Mac and iOS apps. But before that it was dropping support for PPC apps and 68K apps.

On the hardware side, the funniest was they dropped support for my Core 2 Duo Mac Mini and I could still install a supported version of Windows 7 on it.

[worik]

> they do a fantastic job supporting legacy APIs, frameworks, and devices

They do not.

They talk a good game, but the development tools, bright and shiny, but mostly work.

Mostly, is not good enough.

While they have so much mind share in the USA they are unavoidable. But from a developer perspective they are dire

As of two years ago. I find it hard to believe they have changed

[morshu9001]

There are 10 different answers for how to take a substring by index+len, depending on which version of Swift. They even changed how arrays as function parameters work between versions.

[rTX5CMRXIfFG]

So then just use one version of Swift

[morshu9001]

Not viable to stay on an old version, especially doing iPhone dev. The real answer back in the Swift 1-4 times was to just use ObjC instead, it still had full support.