[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.

[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.

[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/

[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.