duckerude
Joined 9 years ago
Joined 9 years ago
AFAIK this was not a clean room reimplementation. But since it was rewritten by hand, into a different language, with not just a different internal design but a different API, I could easily buy that chardetng doesn't infringe while Python chardet 7 does.
(At the time it wasn't public which OEM GrapheneOS would partner with.)
You can choose to never make use of that property. But it's tempting.
PHP chose to check types at runtime. To check that a value is really an array<int> the runtime could have to loop through the entire array. All the types PHP currently implements are simple and cheap to check. For more elaborate cases you need an offline checker like PHPstan and comment-based type annotations. (PHPstan catches 99% of issues before the runtime gets to it so for my own code I'd prefer the Python approach with its cleaner syntax.)
The runtime checking seems the key difference, not so much the historical strength of the type system. Python's language implementation does very little typechecking itself and PHP's third-party offline typecheckers are respectably advanced.
By Stallman's own telling a free Objective-C frontend was an unexpected outcome. Until it came up in practice he thought a proprietary compiler frontend would be legal (https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp/blob/dd313099db351c90431c...). So his stance in this email is a reaction to specific incidents, not careful forethought.
And the harms of permissive licensing for compiler frontends seem pretty underwhelming. After Apple moved to LLVM it largely kept releasing free compiler frontends. (But maybe I'd think differently if I e.g. understood GNAT's licensing better.)
>>> from io import StringIO
>>> for line in StringIO("foo\x85bar\vquux\u2028zoot"): print(repr(line))
...
'foo\x85bar\x0bquux\u2028zoot'mrustc is a bootstrap Rust compiler that doesn't implement a borrow checker but can compile valid programs, so it's similar to to your proposed subset. Rust minus verification is still a very large and complex language though, just like C++ is large and complex.
A core language that's as simple to implement as C would have to be very different and many people (I suspect most) would like it less than the Rust that exists.
If you run into this when encoding to UTF-8 then your source data isn't valid Unicode and it depends on what it really is if not proper Unicode. If you can validate at other boundaries then you won't have to deal with it there.
WTF-8 has some inconvenient properties. Concatenating two strings requires special handling. Rust's opaque types can patch over this but I bet Go's WTF-8 handling exposes some unintuitive behavior.
There is a desire to add a normal string API to OsStr but the details aren't settled. For example: should it be possible to split an OsStr on an OsStr needle? This can be implemented but it'd require switching to OMG-WTF-8 (https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/2295-os-str-pattern.html), an encoding with even more special cases. (I've thrown my own hat into this ring with OsStr::slice_encoded_bytes().)
The current state is pretty sad yeah. If you're OK with losing portability you can use the OsStrExt extension traits.