I mean, don’t get me wrong, I also find startup time important, particularly with CLIs. But high memory usage slows down your application in other ways, too (not just other applications on the system). You will have more L1, L2 etc. cache misses. And the OS is more likely to page/swap out more of your memory onto the hard drive.

Of course, I don’t either sit in front of an application and can tell that it was a non-local NUMA memory access that caused a particular slowness, so I can understand not really being able to care for iterative improvements. But yeah, that is also why I quite like using an efficient stack outright. It just makes computers feel as fast as they should be, without me having to worry about it.

I don’t know what part of that is supposed to be an insult.

And the article may have talked of such stark differences, but I didn’t. I’m just saying that the resource usage is noticeably lower.

Yeah, you need to do tree-shaking with JavaScript to get rid of unused library code: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Tree_shaking

I would expect larger corporate projects to do so. It is something that one needs to know about and configure, but if one senior webdev works on a project, they’ll set it up pretty quickly.

This isn’t Reddit. You don’t need to talk in absolutes.

Similar to WittyShizard, my experience is very different. Said Rust application uses 1200 dependencies and I think around 50 MB RAM. We had a Kotlin application beforehand, which used around 300 dependencies and 1 GB RAM, I believe. I would expect a JavaScript application of similar complexity to use a similar amount or more RAM.

And more efficient languages do have an effect on RAM usage, for example:

• Not using garbage collection means objects generally get cleared from RAM quicker.
• Iterating over substrings or list elements is likely to be implement more efficiently, for example Rust has string slices and explicit .iter() + .collect().
• People in the ecosystem will want to use the language for use-cases where efficiency is important and then help optimize libraries.
• You’ve even got stupid shit, for example in garbage-collected languages, it has traditionally been considered best practice, that if you’re doing async, you should use immutable data types and then always create a copy of them when you want to update them. That uses a ton of RAM for stupid reasons.

Yeah, gonna be interesting. Software companies working on consumer software often don’t need to care, because:

• They don’t need to buy the RAM that they’re filling up.
• They’re not the only culprit on your PC.
• Consumers don’t understand how RAM works nearly as well as they understand fuel.
• And even when consumers understand that an application is using too much, they may not be able to switch to an alternative either way, see for example the many chat applications written in Electron, none of which are interoperable.

I can see somewhat of a shift happening for software that companies develop for themselves, though. At $DAYJOB, we have an application written in Rust and you can practically see the dollar signs lighting up in the eyes of management when you tell them “just get the cheapest device to run it on” and “it’s hardly going to incur cloud hosting costs”.
Obviously this alone rarely leads to management deciding to rewrite an application/service in a more efficient language, but it certainly makes them more open to devs wanting to use these languages. Well, and who knows what happens, if the prices for Raspberry Pis and cloud hosting and such end up skyrocketing similarly.

The problem is that it sounds like a riddle. In a riddle, you’re traditionally supposed to work within the rules that you’ve been told. So, not thinking outside the box here is not an indication that the person isn’t capable of doing so.

Of course, if I encountered this problem in real life, I’d ask Carol from accounting to check the other room, while I flip the switches. But my instinctive answer was that it is not possible, because I assumed it to be a riddle and the provided rules did not allow a solution.

I mean, there is a reason why that is so pervasive. It makes you set up the dev environment and figure out how to run a program, which is a step that you cannot skip.

Of course, you should go for a slightly more complex project afterwards.

To be fair, you can also somewhat steer whether it will take off as a dev, by how you promote it and how much time you take to make it easily usable by others. Many devs really don’t care to have their passion projects take off, because it means you’ll likely spend less time doing your passion thing, more time doing user support.

I almost expected someone to learn that just from me posting. 😅

Basically, OpenOffice used to be organized by Sun Microsystems. Then Sun got bought by Oracle back in 2010.
Oracle does not have a good reputation at all, so the OpenOffice devs from back then figured they’d need to take things into their own hands and set up The Document Foundation to organize further development. But the OpenOffice trademark was owned by Sun/Oracle, so they had to rename and get a new homepage and everything. The name they chose is LibreOffice: https://www.libreoffice.org/

After the OpenOffice project was effectively dead, Oracle handed it and its trademark over to the Apache Foundation, where it’s seeing occasional bug fixes. But to my knowledge, they don’t even have the capacity to fix all the security problems.
All the actual feature development happens over on the LibreOffice side.

So, in practice, if you want OpenOffice, what you really want is LibreOffice.

Yeah, not great. You always hope that projects under a larger foundation, like GNOME, have a higher bus factor¹, but unless that foundation has dispensible income to pay someone, you’re ultimately still reliant on volunteers and not many people volunteer for maintenance.

What the foundation can do, though, which is also really important, is to hand over the keys to a new maintainer, should you disappear over night.
Like, yeah, forking is great, but some people will never learn of the fork. It happens about once a year that I find someone online who’s still using OpenOffice and that project has been practically dead since 2011.
So, I do hope we can get more open-source projects under some sort of umbrella. No idea how to actually do that, though. I also have open-source projects where I would not even know where to start to get them under some organization…

LibreOffice Draw works decently well for this.

Hmm, well no, but don’t you still risk being banned or at least being hidden away by the Algorithm™, if such scandalous thing as a nipple is to be seen?

I’m not sure now, if she actually said this is why she’s on PeerTube. Could also be that other social media platforms pissed her off and then she found a new home on the fediverse.

…just remembered, she recently posted a video, where she’s unboxing a Mastodon plush and figured, maybe she says something there, and yeah: Apparently, she got banned from Instagram a whole bunch of times, so now she’s self-hosting Masto and then evidentally also PeerTube.

https://peertube.doesstuff.social/w/qskCWUnsmJZLZ9ZP4KCiph

Yeah, Lety does some NSFW-adjacent videos, which YouTube is too stuck up for.

Most of the stuff posted to video.thepolarbear.co.uk is.

The guy who hosts the PeerTube instance, Hamish, is hardline anti-big-tech, I believe. Whereas Chris Were and Drew / uoou are mostly just tired of YouTube commenters. Well, and there’s some other folks, who occasionally post there, where I don’t know, whether they post to YouTube, too.

Oh man, I think it’s been taken offline, but there was a video podcast thingamabob on PeerTube, where two dudes would wax philosophically about politics, which they called “Dagoth Hour”. 🙃

(The main baddy in Morrowind is called “Dagoth Ur” and he likes to wax philosophically.)

:l

I really don’t agree with saving keypresses being a useful metric, since auto-completion is a thing and code is read significantly more often than it is written. I am also a staunch opponent of abbreviations being used for variable names.

But I will say that I don’t mind abbreviations in keywords, since well, you need to learn the meaning either way.
And yeah, I’ve come to somewhat like them being used for keywords, since it reduces visual noise where it really isn’t useful, and it distinguishes keywords from actual code.
Ultimately, keywords are just syntax where letters were used instead of a symbol. You do read them like a symbol, so if they don’t look like a real word, that seems to work quite well for my brain.

Well, you’d typically put the loops into a function and then do an explicit return to jump out of there. I believe, there’s some use-cases where this isn’t possible, which is why I’m cool with loop labels existing, but I’ve been coding Rust for seven years and have not needed them once…

I’m not sure, what you mean by “Chekhov’s footgun”, but well, it isn’t a footgun, so you won’t accidentally return a wrong value from the function, if that’s what you’re thinking.

It’s not a Rust invention, most functional programming languages have implicit returns, but basically think less of them as a function return and more just as the value that a scope evaluates to.

So, here’s a simple example:

let sum = {
    let x = 5 + 9;
    3 * x
};

Obviously, this is an extremely contrived example, but yeah, as you can see, it does not even have to involve a function. The implicit return makes it so that sum is set to the result from 3 * x.
And the scope-braces are nice here, because you can do intermediate steps without having x in scope for the rest of your function.

In practice, if you see scope-braces and the line at the end does not have a semicolon, then that’s the value that the whole scope evaluates to. Those scope-braces can also be the braces of a function, but then you need to annotate what the function is going to return, too, so it’s practically impossible to return a wrong value.

Well, and I would actually argue that explicit returns are a footgun in comparison.
Because someone might introduce clean-up code at the end of the function and not realize that an explicit return skips that clean-up code, somewhere further up in the function.
The implicit return always has to be at the end of the scope, so it’s not possible to accidentally skip code.

That is, like, genuinely an advantage, though. At $ DAYJOB, we have a project that spans embedded, backend, web frontend and CLI, and for all of these, Rust is decent.

Like, I can see why a frontend dev would want to use HTML+CSS+JS/TS (rather than HTML+CSS+Rust), mainly because the massive ecosystem of JS components makes you more productive.

But you pretty much won’t ever develop a web frontend without an accompanying backend, and then being able to use the same language-expertise, libraries, utility functions and model types, that is also a big boost to productivity, especially if you won’t have a dedicated frontend dev anyways.

Realizing that also made me understand why people subject themselves to NodeJS for their backend, which has the same advantage, just with the big ecosystem in the frontend and the small ecosystem in the backend.