LeFantome

When everybody talked about “shithole countries”, practically everybody outside the United States thought of one country that deserved that label (we all thought of the same one).

Only for those that blow

Agreed. The C++ guys are basically JavaScript guys arguing that type safety errors are a skill issue. They must hate TyoeScript.

Some bugs. I have never heard anybody remotely skilled in Rust claim that it prevents bugs in general.

Python prevents many classes of bugs too (compared to C++). And any statically typed compiler will prevent some bugs that Python allows. Not too controversial I hope. Of course, unlike Rust, Python is unsuitable for many C++ use cases for other reasons.

I do not use Rust and my self-image is not tied to C++. So I do not have to get upset when people explain the benefits of Rust.

Rust is not perfect. That is why I do not use it. But it is not some elaborate lie either. It was designed to do certain things, and it does.

Java was created so that teams of intermediate skill programmers could maintain large, long-lived code bases. And it did its job incredibly well.

If that is not your use case (or you do not want to admit that you are such a programmer), it may not be your favourite language.

I always like C# far better. It may be my favourite language overall. It has a bit more headroom and was designed somebody far more skilled. But it was designed to compete directly with Java. So, you know who it was built for.

Sadly, it is a detachment from reality that is entirely normal, even typical. In all walks of life.

What I still find surprising, even though normal, is how technical people can push actual facts and evidence right out of their world view.

Sure, 70% of the bugs in C++ code bases are memory rated according to multiple sources. So let me aggressively and confidently berate this idiot that says the Rust compiler is doing something useful.

You do not have to use either language to see how idiotic this is. Even if you accept that this guy has “the skill” to make compiler help redundant, he has no point at all unless he thinks that “typical” C++ users have that same level of skill. And, provably and trivially researched—they do not. Being this wrong makes him, as self-evidenced, incompetent by definition.

All he proves in the end is that he is angry (and I guess not a fan of Rust).

“Angry and incompetent” is sadly a much more common trope than the ones he tires off.

Poor guy. $29 billion does not even begin to cover what he has lost on the falling stock price.

Sorry to have not gotten back to this.

I did not advocate for high earners (or for anybody actually). Your comment has nothing to do with mine.

I made no value judgements at all, did not take a political side, and I certainly did not clutch any pearls.

What I said, and tried to demonstrate, is that a statement (a mathematical calculation - not an opinion) was reasonably accurate.

I do advocate for accuracy and rationality though. Fact free politics bothers me (no matter the source or the target). So, your comment would certainly make me reach for my pearls if I had any.

There are many other taxes. There are luxury taxes, payroll taxes, land transfer taxes, estate taxes, import duties, tariffs, and many excise taxes just as examples. There are a lot of “registrations” and tolls that are really just taxes. And the GST and often Provincial taxes are not just charged to the end consumer but in fact multiple times along the supply-chain in practice.

If you live in BC, your property tax is likely more than you suggest. If you drink, your sales tax will be as well. If you rent, how much are you paying to cover your landlords income tax? And again, there are many other taxes. Again using BC, gasoline tax is 37 cents a litre of tax before you tack on the GST. That can be 50%. And the tax on cigarettes can be 250%. What is your total tax rate if you spend your $88k “after-tax” income on gas and cigs?

Ontario slashed their liquor tax in half. Now it is only 30%.

I am not sure that saying 50% is propaganda and then calculating it to be 42% is a total slam dunk anyway. But it is also far from the worst case scenario as you left a lot of stuff out.

And, if it was 42%, you land on June 8 which is exactly when the Fraser Institute says tax freedom day is anyway. Those lying bastards!

But I get your point.

And I am quite happy with the way Canada manages taxation (though perhaps not spending). I am not trying to scare anybody into anything.

I was in Ottawa for Canada Day. I wish we had your traffic.

Disparagated? I assume you mean disparaging but that does not really track to the copium comment.

I know I am coming off a bit harsh. I am just tired of Xorg fans going off about how Wayland is not ready when it is already the most popular desktop Linux display server.

I don’t like systemd but I would not be expected to be taken very seriously if I wrote an article saying that people will never use it when 90% of Linux desktops are systemd based.

Or perhaps in should write an article about how nobody clang is not ready because I have a use case it does not fit.

And the list of things that Wayland can do that Xorg cannot is longer than the reverse at this point. So, a list of things you prefer about Xorg is just a personal preference at best at this point. Trying to argue that Wayland is “not ready” when it is both more advanced and more popular should be called out for what it is.

Shouting that the guy crossing the finish line ahead of you does not stand a chance just sounds stupid. And that is what this article is doing.

Ya, I am not going to defend how Wayland has been rolled out.

I think competing implementations is a good thing. But it would have been nice if the reference implementation was usable early on. Nobody ever used Weston. If you did, you came away thinking Wayland did not work. A reference implementation that worked and that others could build real compositors from would have been welcome.

Instead, the big desktops like GNOME and KDE created their own compositors but not in a way that others could really reuse.

It was not until Sway (not even a great compositor) created wlroots that things got better. There are now many wlroots based compositors. And Smithay on Rust is great. The main driver for Smithay has been COSMIC but Niri used it to create a compositor quickly. And now there are Louvre, mir, SWC, aquamarine (used for Hyprland), and other compositor toolkits like the one XFCE is creating.

Both KDE and GNOME support most of the same standards now, and wlroots and smithay are not far behind. Bringing back the browser analogy, these are like blink, gecko, and WebKit—engines that other project can use to create a browser without having to do all the hard work of creating a browser.

In the end, building a new compositor on one of these foundations is going to resemble what it took to build a window manager for X11. And your new compositor will be pretty standards compliant because your engine is.

In Wayland, there is the core display server but also the extension protocols implemented as XDG desktop portal and the like. You can mix and match the core toolkit and portals. Using Niri as an example again, it uses Smithay for the compositor but combines that with the XDG stuff from GNOME. Projects like wlroots give you both sides (eg. there is a xdg-desktop-portal-wlr).

In a couple of years, the top toolkits will be mature and the compositors built with them will support a complete and common set of standards. So, we will be a good place.

But the Wayland architecture will mean that some new and better compositor library will be able to emerge and new and better compositors can be built from it. And that will drive all the others to improve. We will not have just the one universal but ancient implementation like we did with X11.

Back to the browser analogy, it is great that Chromium (blink) and Firefox based browsers exist and that we have so many browsers to choose from. There are very few web engines but they are mature and standards compliant. The engines compete with each other which drives them to be better and all the browsers benefit. But it is also great the Ladybird can come around and compete directly with an entirely new engine from scratch. This is what Wayland will look like in a couple of years.