No, I think the idea of blessing a set of crates (with versions!) is better. The stdlib has a high burden of maintenance, and ideally should only be added to if changes are always backwards compatible. A blessed set is more flexible but still provides a high degree of reliability, unlike the present situation.
In the long term, I think civilizations grow along the lines of natural selection. They are neither optimal nor pessimal, but are likely to display a high degree of fitness. Environmental shocks in the short term will challenge fitness. Competition among civilizations also challenges fitness.
Why indeed was Europe technologically advanced? Why were the Americas not so much? Resources are one factor, which is why obtaining resources from other lands is valuable. But the main impetus for advancement surely isn't based on one's "skill in advancing". Most people could be trained to fix cars, if desired. Also, Rome fell, but people now live where Rome was with far greater technology. I posit that, if the indigenous peoples of the Americas were given the desire to advance to the level of Europeans, the resources to do so, and time, similar advancement would arise.
I'm not saying that people don't comment in bad faith here. But if someone's first thought upon seeing significant negativity is that a coordinated, massive campaign is occurring, that someone is probably wrong. Commenting in that vein also harms discussion. If Hacker News is to foster good discussion, then simply not being a troll or ideologue is not sufficient.
There really are many people here, with largely diverse opinions. Don't lump people together unless they lump themselves together.
Perhaps you should qualify your claims, because disease and war by Europeans to the indigenous peoples had a significant death toll and negative impact (e.g. forced migration or cultural reeducation).
Going by some of the statements in this thread, if Spain-after-colonialism becomes richer and more developed, such that the average citizen's standard of living increases, then colonialism benefitted the average citizen. Benefit to the colonized peoples aside, surely many other people benefitted, even if they weren't immensely enriched.
> people A did X bad things to people B thus people A are responsible for demise of people B
In this case, people A are responsible for most of the demise of people B, surely. I don't deny that history education should be improved on these matters, instead of choosing a villain and a victim, but your view is not much better.
Can one not say that both the tribes and the Westerners committed atrocities? I think most people in this thread who agree with the latter group would be willing to include the former group. And you are ignoring the relative scales.
Are you saying that the average person in Spain did not support colonialism (let's suppose after the benefits of colonialism became apparent)? Would they be horrified that Spaniards had killed "barbarians" and "savages" (as they were described) and gained great riches? Other people have brought up religion; how many Christians condemned the Crusades?
I find it reasonable to assume that any civilization will gradually adapt to meet demands, given whichever constraints burden it. Europe (and the US) had opportunities (partly due to colonialism) to become industrialized and prosperous, and it has taken those opportunities. So it is with China. Africa has opportunities, but colonialism has made progress difficult. In the long term, I think cultural/societal differences are not the deciding factor, so much as the geopolitical environment shapes society. The formation of mountains doesn't much care about the contemporary scale of human construction projects, either.
You seem to be saying that colonialism advanced society even for the oppressed, but the causality of history is complicated. As far as we know, you may as well say that the extinction of the dinosaurs as it happened was essential for human proliferation. Maybe the dinosaurs would've gone extinct at some point, or diminished greatly, or maybe the dinosaurs and humans would coexist. Just because a somewhat plausible scenario presents itself does not mean it is compelling. You have brought up counterfactuals, so use your imagination seriously, instead of taking the easy way out. If you have a motivating belief on the matter, it is untoward to speak as if you are unbiased and objective.
I should have elaborated. If a program is known to be malicious, or should be treated as malicious, then it should probably be terminated. Given a potentially malicious program and no easy way to determine (lack of) malice, sandboxing is a reasonable measure.
Implementations can always get better, but I think the only categorical (if even that) improvement that will arise depends on careful program design/implementation; that is, reducing the scope and number of capabilities and providing semantic information on capability usage. Fil-C and CHERI do an admirable job of maximizing backwards compatibility and even allowing incremental improvements, but I think it's time that programmers bought into capabilities too.
As others have said, programs that have already been written are plainly not in the business of "not...[shipping] bugs in the first place". New code is new code; old code is old code.
Having only two major options, X and Wayland, doesn't mean either one is correct. It is generally true that X needs to be replaced, but Wayland is not necessarily the replacement we need. It would be good to have more competition.
On a separate note, I think it's probably true that Wayland has significant drawbacks that preclude it from being an obvious replacement.
I maintain that microbenchmarks are not convincing, but you have a fair point that GP's statement is unfounded, and now I've made a reply to GP to that effect.
A GC lang isn't necessarily significantly slower than C. You should qualify your statements. Moreover, this is a variant of C, which means that the programs are likely less liberal with heap allocations. It remains to be seen how much of a slowdown Fil-C imposes under normal operating conditions. Moreover, although it is indeed primarily suited for existing programs, its use in new programs isn't necessarily worse than, e.g., C# or Go. If performance is the deciding factor, probably use Rust, Zig, Nim, D, etc. .
Hacker News is not a place where any one group brigrades a thread. There are people who prefer C who don't want a GC, people who prefer Rust who don't want C, people who prefer Rust who agree with Fil-C for legacy C, people who don't prefer C or Rust and may use languages with GC.... We all have interests and face people who denigrate them in bad faith. If you have specific objections to inaccurate statements in this thread, then state them. I'll do the same for any technology if I'm qualified to make statements on it.
Along with the sibling comment, microbenchmarks should not be used as authoritative data when the use case is full applications. For that matter, highly optimized Java or Go may be "1 to 4 times as slow as plain C". Fil-C has its merits, but they should be described carefully, just with any technology.
I don't have numbers, but Rust is also terrible for binary size. Large Rust binaries can be improved with various efforts, but it's not friendly by default. Rust focuses on runtime performance, high-level programming, and compile-time guarantees, but compile times and binary sizes are the drawback. Notably, Rust prefers static linking.
> The state-machine transformation inside rustc is a thing of beauty, but the libraries and APIs layered on top of that should have been iterated many more times before being rolled out into widespread use.
Quite. The mistake was advertising the feature as production-ready (albeit not complete), which led the ecosystem to adopt async faster than it could work out the flaws and footguns. The nice thing about the language/library split is that there is a path to good async Rust without major backwards-compatibility-breaking language changes (probably...), because the core concepts are sound, but the library ecosystem will bear the necessary brunt of evolution.
Tragedy of the commons is separate, and I think a more serious issue. If the only problem is clashing cultures, a firm warning would suffice. However, people who have more or less the same culture may still perpetrate the tragedy of the commons, and I think culture is not much of a factor. Tragedies of the commons occur when people do not see or care how their individual actions affect the collective.
To be fair, what do you suppose they should do instead? ID isn't popular at all. I don't think the profit motive here is the same as Instagram's, with the latter putting up a front about child safety but making big money from children.
Please don't assume the entire Rust community, or most of it, is intent on rewriting all legacy software. Frankly, I think the more familiar one is with Rust, the less one is inclined to blindly advocate for rewriting things in Rust, and the Rust language developers are among those most familiar.
A change in mindset must happen, but the proper mindset in which to change one's mindset is elusive. Even if my mindset today is flawed, what specifically should stay and what should go to make myself a better person? It feels like leaping from a safe harbor into the unknown. Can you convince a person to kill themselves and let a near-copy-but-not-quite live their life instead?
That being said, I think some positive change can be produced with diligence and care, even if the methods and details are hazy even to the person enacting them.
Yes, then there is no way to elevate Bob above Alice, but in practice I think the assumption of external indistinguishability is too strong, and even the suspicion that Alice is sketchy (i.e. without hard proof) is meaningful.