pornel

4 still shipped with buttons my mum could recognise.

Apple's design never recovered from the flattening of iOS 7.

You get stricter enforcement of public APIs and dependencies. You can't import anything you haven't declared as a dep, and cycles are impossible. Rustdoc by default shows only your intended public API.

OTOH if you have one crate with lots of modules, it's tempting to import anything anywhere and use pub(crate). Rustdoc needs to be configured to show private items if you want to see internal APIs.

Cloudflare is all in on Rust, it's used everywhere by default, and C++ leftovers are being actively torn down.

v4 was a worse overthinker. 4.1 mostly fixed that. It still prefers to plan everything before making a single file change.

If I'm impatient I switch to Luna for a single turn just to get it started and let DS continue.

Excuse me, Hole of America.

The container is useless. Files based on a newer codec won't display anyway.

ISO-BMFF container is bloated and needlessly complicated. AVIF decoders didn't even want to reuse existing MP4 libraries for it due to all the baggage it brings, and implemented their own minimal parsers.

AVIF would have been better off with a simple wrapper similar to RIFF/PNG or extending AV1's own OBU header (which for inexplicable reason gets its data duplicated inside the HEIF container and then implementations are required to verify that both copies agree!)

I hope AVIF will skip AV2. We don't need yet another almost-identical format to migrate to.

And alternative rendering methods like Commanche's voxel weren't doable on the GPU for a long time.

Off-loads sample mixing to the sound card. Computers of that era were slow enough that doing 44100 additions per second was expensive (IIRC quake had 8Khz samples anyway).

HomeKit is so painfully slow and flaky.

I've switched to Home Assistant and the same devices on the same network work instantly, as they should.

Apple is so terrible at this. They have nobody to blame: it's their system, their protocol (I have pre-Matter devices), their home hub, their certified devices.

Home Assistant with a pile of community-maintained python hacks runs circles around Apple.

DeepSeek has very good bang for the buck if you're paying API prices.

1:1 rewrites from C are perfectly doable. You can use C FFI and rewrite function by function, bug for bug, while checking snapshot tests. I've converted a few libraries this way, before AI. I caught C bugs this way, and then was able to further refactor and improve the Rust version. In the end, I'm super happy with the results and I'm never touching autotools or cmake again!

The pool of C software worth rewriting is shrinking. There are the few too-big-to-rewrite projects that will never move, but everything else is either getting rewritten, or has more modern replacements already written directly in Rust.

I can't vouch for LLM-assisted rewrites. The results can be randomly dodgy regardless of what you're writing or rewriting. I suspect we'll get plenty more LLM rewrites anyway, and people will just compensate by sending LLMs hunting for bugs by brute force.

It's been over 10 years since Rust 1.0 was released, and C programmers still see it as a new fad. Yet, the same article mentions, but fails to connect the dots, that even the large slow-moving corporations bankrolling the foundation have already adopted Rust and are leaving C as fast as they can.

It's a typical C mindset that rewriting programs creates new bugs, because it takes years to "battle test" and shake bugs out of a C program. In my experience rewrites in Rust uncover latent bugs of C programs when they finally get checked lifetimes, useful type system, enforced error checking, etc.

Lack of conscience is a unique advantage.

but who's using it? Where are the hordes of SPARC users craving cutting-edge software?