I figured that articles like folklore are like an amusing movie file (say someone chopping a skin of a watermelon) that's repeatedly being passed around reddit.
"Seems like a waste of effort" in a vacuum yes, but
1 - GNU utilities is ancient crufty #IFDEF'd C that's been in maintenance mode for decades. You want code to handle quirks of Tru64 and Ultrix? You got it.
2 - Waving your hands around 'the community will take care of it' is magical thinking. C developers don't grow on trees. C tooling is kinda weird and doesn't resemble anything modern - good luck finding enough VOLUNTEER C developers to make your goals happen.
you're just an end user, you don't have to maintain the suite.
In OSS every hour of volunteer time is precious Manna from heaven, flavored with unicorn tears. So any way to remove Toil and introduce automation is gold.
Rust's strict compiler and an appropriate test suite guarantees a level of correctness far beyond C. There's less onus on the reviewer to ensure everything still works as expected when reviewing a pull request.
there were crematoriums falling apart because of constant use. Morgues overflowing with coffins.
Three of my direct coworkers died from covid. One guy didn't get his sense of taste back for a year.
People just gasping to death in their bedrooms waiting for things to improve and only going to the overloaded ER when it's too late.
I'm an asthmatic, I've been close to that feeling where sub 90% oxygen saturation made me feel like death. Anything like 80% your lungs start to fail. You're dead in a hurry.
I'm kind of surprised that after all these years TF2 and Source are still separate entities. Like, is there any TF2-only code in Source that only runs if TF2 is the current mod?
"3. your green field project growing into legacy project."
You do all this upfront design about how it's going to work and then "Oh god there's so many splinters and sharp corners, it's only getting worse and every new team onboarded to the framework needs to have their hands held, and management won't allocate time to address the tech debt."
that's one ep that sticks out in my mind -
hardware hacking to dump a 2600 cartridge and build homebrew development hardware and then reverse engineering to figure out what's what.
Also the subtle flex of making the Donkey Kong girders on an angle when the 2600 is a 'race the beam' system where each scanline must be computed. Even modern homebrew remakes of Donkey Kong on 2600 have horizontal girders.
There are two versions of Ultima 1, the original has BASIC is basic with assembly and there is a remake in pure assembly. You can definitely tell the improvements the asm version brings with the overworld scrolling faster and the first person dungeons redrawing very quickly.
So - I'm guessing game logic of MECC Oregon was in Basic with some assembly routines to re-draw the screen.
BTW original Oregon Trail was also 100% basic and a PITA to read. You're really getting to the edges of what applesoft basic is practically capable of with games like Akalabeth and Oregon
I wonder what an equivalent "BSD from scratch" is like?
Linux was assembled from a collection of parts while BSD is (reputably) a lot more 'designed from the ground up'
Even a modern system like Fuchsia - what's that like to build from the ground up?
Or is it "You fool! Building your own kitbashed Gundam of an OS is the point."
They built a Go store into their office in Bellevue,WA - it's got the freezers and shelves but it hasn't opened. They built a Four Star store into their HQ in Seattle, and they closed it a year later. There's several Amazon Books stores in the area, GONE.
It's like their push for retail is a total dead-end.
I think my time is better spent improving my build and deployment environments instead of something like customizing my text editor. More of my work is in tying command line utilities together
Maybe I don’t know what hardcore emacs use is like.
FWIW - last stage where the binary is produced takes the longest and is single threaded and that's the largest difference between release and debug.