In Memoriam: the free software projects we lost in 2010

I once got the insane idea to implement a RPC in c++ that would let me construct a function call on-the-fly based on a spec coming from the client. Turns out you need to write little assembly routines to do this.

After some work building my own library, I found libffi, but it was hard to get to, hadn't been updated in 10 years, so I kept soldiering on with my solution. I checked the site a few months later, and discovered that after 10 years of no updates, the project suddenly woke up a little while after I checked, was re-packaged in an easy-to-use tarball, etc...

Could have saved a lot of time (and brain cells wasted on assembly :P), if I had more faith, and was more patient..

Btw, I just subscribed to lwn.net, and now it looks completely different - it took me 15 minutes to find this article again. Is there a way to log in, but have it "look like it did before" - except I can access the subscriber only content??