[0xpgm]

In my mind this highlights something I've been thinking about, the differences between FOSS influenced by corporate needs vs FOSS driven by the hacker community.

FOSS driven by hackers is about increasing and maintaining support (old and new hardware, languages etc..) while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust (architectures unsupported by Rust lose support).

[JoshTriplett]

> while FOSS influenced by corporate needs is about standardizing around 'blessed' platforms like is happening in Linux distributions with adoption of Rust

Rust's target tier support policies aren't based on "corporate needs". They're based, primarily, on having people willing to do the work to support the target on an ongoing basis, and provide the logistics needed to make sure it works.

The main difference, I would say, is that many projects essentially provide the equivalent of Rust's "tier 3" ("the code is there, it might even work") without documenting it as such.

[FrankenApps]

The Rust Community is working on gcc-rs for this very reason.

[SkiFire13]

gcc-rs is far from being usable. If you want to use Rust with gcc-only targets you're probably better off with rustc_codegen_gcc instead.

[seg_lol]

One could also compile to wasm, and then convert that wasm to C.

[mkornaukhov]

It sounds convenient %)

[uecker]

The issue is that certain specific parts of the industry currently pour in a lot of money into the Rust ecosystem, but selectively only where they need it.

[bhaak]

How is that different than scratching one’s own itch?

[pxc]

Personal itches are more varied and strange than corporate itches. What companies are willing to pour time (money) into is constrained by market forces. The constraints on the efforts of independent hackers are different.

Both sets of constraints produce patterns and gaps. UX and documentation are commonly cited gaps for volunteer programming efforts, for example.

But I think it's true that corporate funding has its own gaps and other distinctive tendencies.

[uecker]

It is not, but the open-source community should be aware of this and not completely realign reorganize around the itches of specific stakeholders, at least the parts of the community who are not paid by those.

[gldrk]

The big difference is that Algol 68 is set in stone. This is what allows a single dedicated person to write the initial code and for it to keep working essentially forever with only minor changes. The Rust frontend will inevitably become obsolete without active development.

Algol 68 isn’t any more useful than obsolete Rust, however.

[jemarch]

The core Algol 68 language is indeed set in stone.

But we are carefully adding many GNU extensions to the language, as was explicitly allowed by the Revised Report:

  [RR page 52]
  "[...] a superlanguage of ALGOL 68 might be defined by additions to
   the syntax, semantics or standard-prelude, so as to improve
   efficiency or to permit the solution of problems not readily
   amenable to ALGOL 68."

The resulting language, which we call GNU Algol 68, is a strict super-language of Algol 68.

You can find the extensions currently implemented by GCC listed at https://algol68-lang.org/

[dfawcus]

I had a small programming task a while ago, and decided to try doing it algol68 (using the algol68 genie interpreter) simply because I'd had some exposure to the language many years ago at Uni.

It was an AWK like task, but I decided up front it was too much trouble to do in AWK, as I needed to build a graph of data structures from the input data.

In part the program had an AWK like pattern matching and processing section, which wasn't too awkward. I found having to use REF's more trouble that dealing with pointers, in part due to the forms of auto dereferencing the language uses; but that was expected.

The real problem though was that I ended up needing something like a map / hash-table, and I concluded it was too much trouble to write from scratch.

So in the end I switched the program to be written in Go.

That then suggests a few things to me:

    - it should have an extension library (prelude) offering some form of hash table.

    - it would be useful to add syntax for explicit pointers (PTR keyword) which are not automatically dereferenced when used.

    - maybe have with either something like the Go (or Zig) style syntax for selecting a member of a pointed to struct (a.b) and maybe Zig like explicit defer (ptr.\*).

That latter pointer suggestions because I found the "field OF struct" form too verbose, and especially confusing when juggling REFs which may or may not get auto dereferenced.

[keepamovin]

It's funny, I have a different view. Corporates often need LT maintenance and support for weird old systems. The majority of global programming community often chases shiny new trends in their personal tinkering.

However I think there's the retro-computing, and other hobby niches that align with your hacker view. And certainly there's a bunch of corp enthusiasm for standardizing shiny things.

[uecker]

I think you both are partially right. In fact, the friction I see are where the industry relies on the open-source community for maintenance but then pushes through certain changes they think they need, even if this alienates part of the community.

[physicsguy]

I don’t know that that is fair.

A number of years ago I worked on a POWER9 GPU cluster. This was quite painful - Python had started moving to use wheels and so most projects had started to build these automatically in CI pipelines but pretty much none of these even supported ARM let alone POWER9 architecture. So you were on your own for pretty much anything that wasn’t Numpy. The reason for this of course is just that there was little demand and as a result even fewer people willing to support it.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Not just little demand, also expensive and uncommon hardware. If the maintainers don't have the hardware to test on they can't guarantee support for that hardware. Not having hardware available often happens because there's little demand for it, but the difficulty of maintaining software for rare hardware further reduces the demand for that hardware.

[gnufx]

At least it's been fine for four years of research software on a POWER9 cluster I support (with nodes like the Summit system's).

[fithisux]

You nailed it. I am in the process in my spare time to maintain old Win32 apps, that corporates and always-the-latest-and-greatest crowd has abandoned.

Most people don't care about our history, only what is shiny.

It is sad!

[Levitating]

You don't think the movement to rust is driven by hackers?

[samus]

Rust is by no means allowed in the core yet, only as drivers. So far, there are only a few drivers. Currently, only the Nova driver, Google's Binder IPC and the (out of tree) Apple drivers are of practical relevance.