t43562

I remember optimizing a huge build that took days. We optimised it to only hours on a cluster - it took years to get this right. We realised at the end of this that the packaging system (handled by another team) was taking about 2x longer than the build because there was one particularly huge zipfile that sat there compressing for ever and ever and ever while the rest of the cluster was idle.

As in this story we blew enormous effort optimizing something that was very difficult and because of our blinkers (and our management's blinkers) we missed that it was only able to achieve a limited result. We didn't look at the whole system. In the end it was never fixed because......siloed thinking...or something.

...and now with AI much more of that dreadful software can be built with all the bullshit featuritis that said managers who don't use it think they want.

At least CPython could agree to fix its FFI so that PyPy and others would have a chance.

Perhaps if the money which was spent on the built-in JIT had been spent on PyPy we'd be somewhere.

PyPy wasn't great for me because its startup time interfered with the main usecase I wanted it for in one instance and in another there bugs that made it not quite compatible enough. Money could solve the bug issue.

On the other hand I did get pygame working with it at one point and that seemed like a nice scenario.

I feel like I'm trying to explain a shade of colour to a blind person.

building from source has uses which you believe are worthless and other people don't think are worthless.

Anyone who uses cargo or installs a module for golang is building from source. But that, probably, is considered useful. It's only people who build C code from source who are niche and wierd. ....

The point of converting things is here already - existing code is like a very precise prompt. I've used it for Perl-Python mainly and the results are far better than trying to write new code.

When you think about GNU autotools they're all about being able to compile on platforms that the software has never been compiled on before - that's why there are all those feature tests to see what the OS and compiler support.

I've done this many times on things like AIX 4.3 and HP-UX and so on. Sometimes you can get through the compile without any problems at all and the tool often works enough for your usecase and that's a win.

Sometimes there are particular little problems, sometimes it's something serious like an actual missing C library call or whatever and then you have to do some work. With nicely designed tools that have fairly wide support to begin with this tends to be easier.

I presume that those who don't want to have to build rust just to get python will stick the rust code into an LLM and get out an acceptable analog in C.

for some people the benefits absolutely do outweigh the drawbacks. Maybe not for you....but on the whole I don't know - if the whole issue had been solved without being given attention would you have ended up caring which way it went?

SLS for me. haha. :-) But now at least you have the choice! It's great really. I can use Artix because I like being nearer the bleeding edge but even that is really a lot easier to use than Linux was in the days when I had to compile my kernel.

Nevertheless I remember lots of my friends who started off saying Linux was hopeless and ended up using it and Ubuntu was their gateway. The Linux world now is full of people who are fairly conformist and don't care about how it all began and who don't value the idea that open source has margins from which who knows what world beating things might eventually come. The fact that margins can exist is what makes open source great.

If it compiles then people like me can get it to work. What we cannot do is build an entire rust toolchain to make it compile.

Yes we're using quite an old version 8.13 and yet it does the job for our build which maintains an EXTREMELY important bit of software in public service relating to healthcare.

It's on Itanium so obviously we have to move away from that to Linux but the existence of open source tools like coreutils gives us time.

No such luck with python. We have to postpone some changes as a result.

As I say, there's some kind of effect where changes that are only negative on the margins are cheered until one finds oneself on one of those margins.

On my 10 computers for example? :-) Gentoo wasn't aimed at people with such luxuries.

I'm not a Gentoo user BTW but I do think building from source is attractive for the same reasons cargo (Isn't that build from source mostly?) and go do it.

Linux was obscure and niche for a very long time before Ubuntu existed and Ubuntu only existed because someone bothered to use and develop Linux when it wasn't normal.

The Ubuntu users are only there because after they had told the rest of us how silly we were for using Linux they eventually had to use it themselves for work.

Now we're going to listen to that sort of stuff again without rolling our eyes? ....