Dat Guy

C is awesome.

You do, I won’t. Maybe I’m not misanthropic enough.

I measured Visual Studio Code on Windows 10 a while ago and I wish it was an exaggeration. Glad there are alternatives. I told you there were people who are paid for that. At least you got my point now. Windows and macOS have very decent OS-level GUI APIs. Of course you could just shove a bunch of frameworks upon it and be done with your day, or you use what’s there and still have nice GUIs. Having efficient software is a reason. It’s good to know that you have enough money to buy a new computer every few years so you can run the latest software which can’t do much more than 90s text editors but will still eat magnitudes more resources just because the developers don’t care. Many people can’t.

Statements like this are the exact reason why today’s software is written this way: a text editor eats half a GiB of RAM while idling, two web browser windows force you to close one other application so you won’t run out of resources… I know, “we” (who?) “all” have “unlimited resources” now. That’s not because computers have become any faster - it’s because software has become greedy.

In your company, maybe. It might surprise you to learn that there are companies specialized in making code efficient.

Why does anyone even buy a special keyboard if they're afraid it can't be used for a certain task? We don't.

Which is why people exist who are paid for that.

Some (including me) would say that it's overblown.

Luckily, that's not your task. Gentoo, Void and Slackware are the only three Linux distributions I find acceptable.

Ah, right, but still, not using systemd-boot (they seem to have absorbed gummiboot) is not the same thing as not using systemd.

It does not, because systemd is not a bootloader.

I am well aware of that, but it took them quite some work (and time).

I do not deny this. I also see a huge technical debt with systemd which you obviously don’t. No company or group chose systemd “for easy use”. Excessive lobbying by Red Hat and the narrow ties with GNOME made systemd hard to avoid, that’s a different thing.

Point proven.

You cannot remove systemd from Arch without massive work.

You'd probably like that. But I understand that you don't really care about wasting resources. You have enough of them. For my part, I consider this discussion to be fruitless and will therefore withdraw from it.

Because almost every day I come across people whose computers are fully utilised with a web browser and two other open applications that are essentially in idle mode. We need more and more computing power for fewer and fewer tasks. How much longer do you think this can go on?

Yet. The number of distributions (and desktop applications...) which do not require systemd to be present is being decreased every minute. And once it's there, you can't just uninstall it and run something else. Unlike every other "init system", systemd is like cancer (hard to remove, clinging to every cell it can find).

Ah, sorry. I forgot: Once you work on a non-embedded system, wasting as many resources as you can grab is what you absolutely need to do. (Why?)

You shouldn't hire a company whose entire livelihood is still black hat hacking. Unless the company works for you. Question: Does the NSA work for you? Having most critical services run in a chrooted environment with restricted syscall access by default. Neither do I. And now please check what systemd does. While it started as a orphan process reaper and service starter (...), largely inspired by Solaris's SMF, it has grown quite a lot. Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemd#Ancillary_components Please do not assume that any of these extra components are free to choose.

Who told you that rubbish? A lazy programmer who didn't feel like optimising his software? The main problem with this approach is that in 2024 "all your RAM" can easily be utilised by launching a web browser and a text editor (and nothing else). Let me put it this way: in 1996, somehow more software fitted into less RAM. Don't you see a problem with that?

11 years after Snowden's publications, people unironically want the NSA to be responsible for their computers again? Why? SELinux doesn't seem to be too great anyway: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/selinux-unmanageable.html So, what I mean ... ... is not that you could enable certain kernel security features (which OpenBSD does out of the box, by the way), but having most critical services run in a chrooted environment with restricted syscall access by default. Linux does not do that. Which other init system has grown to absorb a third of your system's core services? The word I should probably have highlighted is "monolithic". You did not answer my question: Are you aware of the implications?

OpenBSD users are safe.

Microsoft is not entirely unbiased when it comes to C vs. C++. The most obvious example is that the Visual Studio compiler still only supports C89 reasonably cleanly, but is one of the first to support new ISO proposals for C++ standards. Of course, the Windows API can be completely mapped in C. You can also map it completely in COBOL. The code examples from Microsoft are C++ and sometimes C#-focussed because Microsoft wants to sell its C++ and C# compilers. However, Microsoft does not have a good C compiler

And eats more RAM.