I mean, for me, it’s also mostly a matter of us doing embedded(-adjacent) software dev. So far, my company would hardly ever choose one stack over another for performance/efficiency reasons. But yeah, maybe that is going to change in the future.

Large shared codebases never reflect a single design, but are always in some intermediate state between different software designs. How the codebase will hang together after an individual change is thus way more important than what ideal “north star” you’re driving towards.

Yeah, learned this the hard way. Came up with an architecture to strive for 1½ years ago. We shipped the last remaining refactorings two weeks ago. It has been a ride. Mostly a ride of perpetually being low-priority, because refactorings always are.

In retrospect, it would’ve likely been better to go for a half-assed architecture that requires less of a diff, while still enabling us to ship similar features. It’s not like the new architecture is a flawless fit either, after 1½ years of evolving requirements.

And ultimately, architecture needs to serve the team. What does not serve the team is 1½ years of architectural limbo.

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.

By “unit”, you probably mean a SystemD unit, right?

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.

Yep. It does also optionally have graphics by the way. It just also has this accompanying text log in case you need to read up on wtf just happened.

Huh, did not know you could redirect confusion, but I guess, Ru is more than just a reflection amulet then. 🙃

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…

The Rust compiler is more sophisticated than most compilers, so it can be slower at the same kind of tasks. But it also just does a different task here.

One of the tradeoffs in Rust’s design is that libraries get compiled specifically for a concrete application. So, whereas in most programming languages, you just download pre-compiled libraries, in Rust, you actually download their source code and compile all of it on your machine.

This isn’t relevant, if you get a pre-built binary. And it’s not particularly relevant during development either, because you get incremental compilation. But yeah, if someone wants to compile a Rust codebase from scratch, then they have to sit through a long build.

Yeah, the good tooling also means it isn’t even terribly difficult for the dev to provide builds, but it isn’t quite as automated as publishing to crates.io, so many don’t bother with automating or manually uploading…

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.

Usually, the desktop environment devs come together and standardize on something. But yeah, someone has to drive that effort. Open-source isn’t really something you plan, you just need someone to push for it.