WingNews logo WingNews GitHub [2]

siteshwar's comments

siteshwar | 7 years ago | on: Fuchsia OS Introduction

> Which "millions of lines of code" are compatible with POSIX without having any Linux or macOS specific code?

Those layers would have to be reimplemented to retain compatibility.

> I think you're hugely overstating the importance of POSIX.

People generally understate importance of POSIX, just because it's old. It's impossible to get APIs perfect and you are throwing away decades of work in the name of getting APIs "right". No one is going to rewrite everything from scratch, just because the new APIs look shiny. For reference read about Unix wars[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_wars

siteshwar | 7 years ago | on: Fuchsia OS Introduction

It's not and eventually they will have to find ways to provide POSIX compatibility, it can happen through a separate compatiblity layer or a library. You don't want to break compatibility with millions of lines of already written code if you want widespread adoption. No one is going to rewrite everything from scratch, just because Google says so.

siteshwar | 7 years ago | on: On Learning Rust and Go: Migrating Away from Python

> Rust is developed by a community, and was started by Mozilla. Go development seems to be de facto controlled by Google, who originated the language. I'd rather bet my non-work future on a language that isn't controlled by a huge corporation, especially one of the main players in today's surveillance economy.

Anyone else agree with this view ? Programming languages should be choosen based on technical merits, rather than who is behind it. Is there a lesson from history that I am missing ?

siteshwar | 7 years ago | on: I fear Google's control of the web

> How does this even make sense ?

Google is highly influential in how information is consumed and distributed. People use chrome to browse web, google search for searching information etc. If they have major control over how information is distributed, they have major control over the web. Ofcourse there are other similar services that are not provided by Google, but they are very less influential due to lack of users.

> You should be scared of walled gardens displacing the web.

What if web becomes a walled garden ? Look at what Google did with DRM[1], even Mozilla had to give up their efforts to fight against it[2]. How could that be possible without having a major influence over the web ?

[1] https://boingboing.net/2017/01/30/google-quietly-makes-optio... [2] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/05/14/drm-and-the-challen...

siteshwar | 8 years ago | on: Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as “not secure”

This is going to be interesting. I believe instead of pushing everyone to use https this will cause an average user to start ignoring the security warning. I see the security warning as a way to reflect what's insecure and not a catalyst to move to more secure methods.

siteshwar | 8 years ago | on: KornShell – Moving forward

I was doing lot of refactoring around ksh93 code and legacy build system was not really helpful in detecting problems. It was best to change it.

siteshwar | 8 years ago | on: KornShell – Moving forward

> a new build system replacing one that already worked fine.

Have you actually tried the legacy build system before making that comment ? If not, I would suggest you to try that. It's by far the worst build system I ever dealt with. Just to give you an example, if there's a compilation failure in the middle of build process, build system will not stop, it will continue to compile everything that it should not compile and then exit with status 0. There was an absolute need to replace it with something newer.

Replacing the build system is just the first step towards improving the code base and it's not the end of it.

page 1
more