greenhouse_gas

What I'd like to see is a memory safe JS interpreter (no JIT) - yes, it will be slow, but 90% of websites don't need JS go that fast, but JIT opens up a security can of worms.

So if I go to Google docs, I can toggle spidermonkey (or whatever Firefox's JS compiler is called nowadays), but if I go to $randomwebsite, I'll get a secure and usable web.

>Actually solving a constraint graph is an NP-hard problem

How big of a deal is this IRL? Assuming you have 1000 modules, how long should it take to solve the graph?

Are you sure? While its open source, your phone won't be (since the OS is MIT licensed, your OEM won't have to give you anything). Can you build a custom ROM without kernel sources?

>Personally I think we’ll see Red Hat getting acquired in the next 5 years,

It would be interesting to see what would happen with linux after that, as they are one of the biggest (if not the biggest) donors to Linux, and while you'll still find Enterprise Linux for the Server (whether it's them or some successor), they are also responsible for things like Linux on the Desktop and FOSS in general, so projects which don't directly make money like Cygwin, gtk, gnome, gcc, and PulseAudio may be in danger.

What happened there? In the 80s they were the next big thing. Then they finished their OS project (when the Linux kernel became available they finally had a FLOSS OS). But they never took off with their high priority projects. Is it that they can't find programmers? Is it that they pay so little that you might as well write your own code and host it on Git*.com?

>Rewrite popular BSD-licensed software as GPLv3?

What do they rewrite? To the best of my knowledge, they have no problem using BSD licensed software, they just won't develop BSD license software[1] (mostly, though they do approve it here and there for new projects).

[1]. More accurately, they won't approve it for new projects. But the projects are fine.

Just wondering how he must feel now!

Why is gnome still the de-facto default DM? Is it just that gnome 2 was great, so gnome 3 (despite practically a new project with a new goal) inherited that position? And not just RedHat. I would expect Debian to ship with Cinnamon or xfce as the default.

It's because the language was made to compile to JS, and competition to JS, so appropriate tradeoffs were made.

For example:

1. JS is single-threaded, with extremely heavy threads only recently made available. So Dart is single threaded, with extremely heavy threads available.

2. JS is weak-typed, so Dart was made optional typed. Remember, it was made before typescript, so they probably didn't expect that such type-heavy features as ADT would interest people.

Kotlin does the same (for example, internal immutability would be much nicer, but since the JVM doesn't support that, neither does Kotlin).

Or languages that compile to JS (like TypeScript). Maybe one day we'll get languages compiling to Dart[1].

[1]. Although it'll be a pity. JS is stuck as a compilation target because it's a standard, and it's old, and even then wasm may one day take over JS. Flutter could have been a library, and one could have written in Go or Rust or Java with Flutter bindings. As it is now, I don't know if its possible.

The thing is that the longer you wait, the harder it will be to migrate, as the codebase size grows (and once you leave beta, people assume that the language is finalized and won't be too happy being forced to refactor their code when Dart 3 comes out). But as it is, I doubt that the nice parts of Kotlin will ever make it to Dart.

Unfortunately, I kind of feel torn: On one hand, I love flutter as a concept[1]. It removes a lot of the baroque from mobile development (no need for the whole RecyclerViewer construction for every list! No Fragments! Doesn't require Android Studio to start working!) but I hate the language (dart). After using Kotlin (let alone Rust), It feels like moving back to Java (no non-nullable types) and in some ways it's actually worse than Java (threads are extremely heavy weight, every interaction with native code is async and slow).

I wish there was:

1. A good Kotlin language server (unlikely, as the company behind the language is an IDE company).

2. A good reactive Kotlin GUI library (meaning, with the ergonomics of Flutter (as in, I don't have to work with Fragments and their lifecycles, just use views)).

3. A good JVM interpreter (to speed up Kotlin/Java compilation)

[1]. No I don't use Flutter to "write two apps for the price of one", as most (of my) apps are just a front-end over a back-end server, so they don't have any special logic worth saving between iOS and Android. I just find Flutter easier to work with relative to Android.