• stochastictrebuchet@sh.itjust.works
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    5 days ago

    I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?

    C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.

    BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)

    • thann@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      If you cant tell from just looking at the relative successes of BSD and linux that copyleft licenses are better than I dont know how to convince you of anything

      • LeFantome@programming.dev
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        3 days ago
        1. using the Linux / BSD situation as a benchmark ignores a lot of history. I would argue that the BSD lawsuit was the deciding factor.

        2. the Linux project is not representative of a typical GPL code base. It rejected GPL3 and features a rather significant exception clause that deviates from GPL2.

        Clang vs GCC is probably a better metric for the role of the license in viability and popularity. Or maybe Postgres vs MySQL.

        Why has nothing GPL replaced Xorg or Mesa or now Wayland?

        Why hasn’t the MIT or Apache license held Rust back from being so popular? Why would Ubuntu be moving away from GNU Coreutils (GPL) to uutils (MIT)? How did Pipewire (MiT) replace PulseAiudio (LGPL)? How did Docker or Kubernetes win (both Apache)? Actually, what non-Red Hat GPL software has dominated a category in the past 10 years?

        If the GPL is the obvious reason for the popularity of Linux, why would RedoxOS choose MIT?

        This is not an anti-GPL rant.

        My point is that choosing the GPL (or not) does not correlate as obviously with project success as you make it sound. It is an opinion that would require a lot more evidence.

      • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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        5 days ago

        By that logic proprietary licenses are best for desktop OSs because Windows has the biggest market share?

        • thann@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 days ago

          Windows has lost more market share in the last 20 years than any other operating system

            • thann@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              5 days ago

              Actually macos was based off of BSD, but there were no basically contributions back to the community, so its whithered away. meanwhile linux is running in every sattelite and scientific insrument, it runs every router and nearly every server that are the internet. Microsoft google and apple all begrudginly make linux better while they make the operating systems they sell worse

    • Zacryon@feddit.org
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      5 days ago

      I don’t like that “C++ isn’t memory safe”. It is. Users of that language are usually just not experienced or educated enough and therefore more mistakes happen.

      I agree though, that other languages like Rust or Java can make it easier to prevent such mistakes.

      In my experience, using smart pointers alone already solves 90% of memory issues I have to deal with. C++ improved a lot in that regard over the decades.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        5 days ago

        I’m very experienced with C++and I still feel like I’m juggling chainsaws every time I use it. And I’ve personally run into into things like use after free errors while working in Chromium. It’s a massive codebase full of multithreading, callbacks, and nonlocal effects. Managing memory may be easy in a simple codebase but it’s a nightmare in Chromium. Tools like AddressSanitizer are a routine part of Chrome development for exactly that reason. And people who think memory management is easy in C++ are precisely the people I expect to introduce a lot of bugs.

        • Zacryon@feddit.org
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          5 days ago

          I’ve a very long track record using C++ as well and I can’t share the feeling. I don’t say it’s alyways easy. I’m just saying that it’s doable and therefore whether the software is memory safe depends on the expertise of the devs. Modern C++ practises, programming patterns and as well tools from the STL (or even your own implementation) make life a lot easier. If you don’t use them, that’s not the languages fault. In the end, how you use the language still matters a lot. If you’d like to think less about memory management, go on and use Rust or C# or Java or even Python if performance doesn’t matter. That’s perfectly fine. This can come with other issues, like more boilerplate in the case of Rust for example, but in the end those languages are tools. Choose the tool which gets your job done.

          • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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            5 days ago

            whether the software is memory safe depends on the expertise of the devs

            No. Just stop. If a language depends on the expertise of the developer to be free of memory bugs, then by definition, it is not memory safe because memory safety means such bugs are impossible by design. Quit trying to redefine what memory safety means. A program being free of memory bugs does not in any way imply memory safety.

            • Zacryon@feddit.org
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              3 days ago

              Yes. I stopped now. I was hinted towards the usual definition of memory safe languages at another point in this discussion.

              Although it is perfectly possible to write memory safe code in C++, I agree that the lack of enforcement makes it inherently unsafe.

          • WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works
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            4 days ago

            I don’t think this solely depends on the level of experience. People make mistakes, and these kinds of mistakes are very hard to find. And don’t tell me you are the perfect coder that makes no mistakes, introduces no bugs.

            • Zacryon@feddit.org
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              3 days ago

              I’m not. But in my experience, using memory safe programming patterns, classes and possibly additional testing and analasys tools do the job quite well.

              But yeah. I changed my mind about this memory-safety-property. The lack of enforcement really does make C++ inherently memory unsafe.

      • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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        5 days ago

        The good news is that the browser comes from Serenity OS which means it probably is lightweight and well written.