The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 1:29 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998)
In reply to: The same old arguments... by mirabilos
Parent article: Eventual Rust in CPython

> This is how we get hobbyist OSes… like Minix and then Linux.

Like OSes built for the most mass-market CPU at the time? There are a lot of hobbyist OSes out there; Rosco is a new OS/system for the M68K. Its audience is fans of retrocomputing and the M68K, and it's not going to hit like Linux or Minix.

Linux on most of these architectures, besides x86 or ARM, have always been rare usages. Even the high-end versions are now weaker than any computer on the market, with the exception of S390.

> And these is where the great enrichment of FOSS is

In the handful of people who still have archaic hardware and are installing new operating systems on them? I'd rather bet on the hundreds of millions of new people who are playing around with their first computer and might be convinced to be FOSS programmers, who could lead FOSS for next forty years, rather than the thousands who want to run Linux on their ancient computers instead of doing anything forward looking.

Yes, we should work with people who want to do what they want on Linux. But hurting the mainstream to support a small minority is not a win, whether you consider popular support or the enrichment of FOSS.

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The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 1:46 UTC (Mon) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (14 responses)

A society is not measured in how it treats the masses; rather, it is measured in how it treats its minorities.

And lots of great things do eventually come from minorities.

I am also thinking of self-hosted systems, not those cross-compiled from a majority system.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 8:49 UTC (Mon) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (12 responses)

You are not a persecuted minority because other people don't want to invest any more effort into supporting your niche hobby hardware in their mainstream software code bases.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 11:19 UTC (Mon) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link] (11 responses)

Don´t build a strawman, I didn't see anybody talking about persecution. The "how a society treats its minorities" insight is not just about treating minorities equally, but about how much community help they receive. For example how many places are made wheelchair-accessible.

Likewise, mainstream community projects are generally willing to do a bit of extra work for niche archs, but the cut-off point for "you're on your own beyond that point" is fuzzy, subjective, and worth debating. Michał Górny's comment in the original thread is pretty clear-thinking: asking for understanding/flexibility/help, but acknowledging that mainstream can't wait forever.

It does look like Rust support work for/by some niche archs got invigorated, partly thanks to this Python discussion. That's a good thing for everybody.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 13:37 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (10 responses)

> I didn't see anybody talking about persecution. The "how a society treats its minorities" insight is not just about treating minorities equally, but about how much community help they receive. For example how many places are made wheelchair-accessible.

First, "community help" is funded by taxes, and "wheelchair-accessible" places are made so because they are forced to do so as a condition of running a public business, not out of the goodness of their hearts. I might add that that accessibility directly results in higher prices for everyone else.

> Likewise, mainstream community projects are generally willing to do a bit of extra work for niche archs,

Generally, that "extra work" is "patches welcome" and increasingly, "supply testing/CI resources that can be relied upon".

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 16:30 UTC (Mon) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link] (9 responses)

> First, "community help" is funded by taxes, and "wheelchair-accessible" places are made so because they are forced to do so as a condition of running a public business, not out of the goodness of their hearts. I might add that that accessibility directly results in higher prices for everyone else.

These facts sound like a rebutal, but I'm not sure of what ? Yes, some (not all) community help is tax-funded and/or legally mandated, and has a price for the overall community. And yet we still do it: we pass those laws, spend that money, and encourage these volunteers. Why ? Because we collectively decided that it was a good thing to do, whether for ethical or practical reasons. Societies keep adjusting how far community help can/should go, but there's a strong correlation between a healthy community and a helpful one.

> Generally, that "extra work" is "patches welcome" and increasingly, "supply testing/CI resources that can be relied upon".

Yes, though even "patches welcome" is not free: it costs reviewer time, ongoing maintenance, implicit commitment, etc. Every project is different: some don't accept patches, some will spend a lot of resources to help a single user.

In CPython's case, the argument is that remaining C-only has an ongoing cost, paid by the project to help minority platforms. That balance has shifted over time: 10 years ago, missing platform support was seen as Rust's problem and could legitimately prevent Rust adoption. Today more and more, it is seen as that platform's problem and dropping support has become the lesser evil.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 18:18 UTC (Mon) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> Yes, though even "patches welcome" is not free: it costs reviewer time, ongoing maintenance, implicit commitment, etc. Every project is different: some don't accept patches, some will spend a lot of resources to help a single user.

Agreed. One project I'm on is a "patches welcome" project for platforms we don't actively support (including WSL, MinGW, Cygwin, FreeBSD, etc.). We will review patches (as time affords), but we cannot guarantee that things won't break without contributed CI resources (and even then, they'll usually be "notification" as we don't have control over the machine(s) and cannot block paying customers on such open-ended things as "CI machine over there is down").

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 19:51 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (7 responses)

> Societies keep adjusting how far community help can/should go, but there's a strong correlation between a healthy community and a helpful one.

Sure. But this is where calling "loose collection of software developers working on a project on an ad-hoc volunteeer basis and a vastly larger number of non-contributing users" a "community" breaks down.

In a "real" society/community, everyone has to explicitly opt in (if only by virtue of not leaving) and once in they have to continually pay (or otherwise contribute) on an ongoing basis (=~taxes) to receive those benefits. Non-compliance with those rules has real penalties are ultimately enforced by, well, literal force.

...A society/community cannot function with zero or purely one-sided obligations.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 20:20 UTC (Mon) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207) [Link] (6 responses)

You're reading too much into this simile, how the rules are(n't) enforced or where resources come from is beside the point. AFAIU, mirabilos's point is just that it's generally a good thing for groups to spend some resources helping weaker members. This applies at every level of human societies. Always within reason: the group won't help beyond its means, or if there really is no expected return.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 23:02 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> Always within reason: the group won't help beyond its means,

It's all well and good to say 'groups should spend some resources helping weaker members', but the fundamental point here remains the simple fact that there are [nearly always] [vastly] fewer available resources than demands placed upon them.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 9, 2025 1:23 UTC (Tue) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't see people running antique hardware as weaker members. They're people who run Arm or x86-64 for normal usage, and work on other systems because it's fun. They likely have more Arm/x86 computing power sitting around than the average user.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 9, 2025 7:42 UTC (Tue) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (3 responses)

Really not.

I use Thinkpad X61 as daily driver for Linux. That’s Core2Duo from 2007.

I use Thinkpad X40 as daily driver for BSD. That’s Pentium M from 2004. I can do everything I need except Firefox and Mu͒seScore on it.

I do have one Raspberry Pi 1… because I got it as a gift.

My home server is a pre-Spectre/Meltdown Pentium 233 MMX.

I use a “dumbphone” for telephoning… I also have an old smartphone, but mostly for GPS for geocaching and the likes.

You significantly overestimate what people need to run to have a good experience.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 9, 2025 8:03 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

So you have a 64-bit x86 system that supports up to 8GB of RAM and is likely faster than any commercial RISC system that can be run without a ludicrous electricity bill. You don't *need* any alternative architectures - and I have enough junk under my desk that if that's the blocker on you running weird old stuff then I'll happily drag some over to Europe when I'm there next week and post them to you, and you can't even argue about it being a waste of hardware because right now I have several old laptops that are doing nothing.

I say this as someone still actively poking at Linux driver support for the Commodore CDTV, and trying to get Zorro III working under Amiga Unix. These are things I find fun to do. I would never ask anyone else to care in the slightest.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 9, 2025 9:05 UTC (Tue) by mirabilos (subscriber, #84359) [Link] (1 responses)

> So you have a 64-bit x86 system that supports up to 8GB of RAM and is likely

Yes, and people are calling it legacy and are wantink to remove support for it already.

It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 9, 2025 9:11 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

In this context? No, Rust compiled code is going to be Just Fine on a Core 2 Duo.

The same old arguments...

Posted Dec 8, 2025 11:36 UTC (Mon) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

> A society is not measured in how it treats the masses; rather, it is measured in how it treats its minorities.

Err, no, societies that have a minority in the lap of luxury on the backs of masses living in squalor don't get rated very high.

In this case, I feel like people who have Alphas and M68K and the rest of the hardware in question tend to be the technological elite, who have a modern computer to do their work on, and have already decided whether or not to be a part of the FOSS community. It's the young kids who we need to keep the community running for another 40 years.