This reasoning is flawed in my opinion, because at the end of the day, the software still has to be paid for (for the people that want/need to make a living out of it), and customers wallet are finite.
Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...
> Libraries written in C++ or Java can generally only be used by applications written in the same language. It is difficult to get an application written in Haskell or Java to invoke a library written in C++. On the other hand, libraries written in C are callable from any programming language.
Not saying they should have picked C++ but that's a bit untrue. It's quite easy given some thought into the API to invoke C++ code in basically any language which can invoke C code, since you can wrap a C++ implementation in a C interface. I've done it multiple time throughout my career (that ended up being called from Python, Swift, Objective-C/C++, Swift, Java, and Kotlin).
And as a side note, you don't have to do object-oriented programming in C++ if you don't want to.
> It's quite easy given some thought into the API to invoke C++ code in basically any language which can invoke C code, since you can wrap a C++ implementation in a C interface
Is it easy to write a nice C interface for C++ that makes heavy use of templates, smart pointers, and move semantics?
I've only seen it done for C++ that is more C than C++, or for libraries that were designed to "bail out" to a C interface.
> Is it easy to write a nice C interface for C++ that makes heavy use of templates, smart pointers, and move semantics?
If the interface itself has or leaks those features, no that's not easy indeed. But if those do not leak, then they can be used internally yes.
My point was not that it's easy to wrap a currently existing C++ library that has modern features in its interface in a C interface, especially post-C++11.
But that if you design something from the ground up, then it's rather easy (with a certain set of constraints). My bad for not conveying that better.
Then the statement "Stuff can't interoperate with c++" is true. Nothing from c++ ever gets exposed. You have to explicitly write a C interface yourself, or avoid using c++ features (write C in c++) so everything looks like C in the first place and all you need is #ifdef __cplusplus extern "C" #endif. But then you're not writing c++ either.
> Then the statement "Stuff can't interoperate with c++" is true
Where is that statement? The statement I reacted to (and with some caveats) was the following: "Libraries written in C++ or Java can generally only be used by applications written in the same language. It is difficult to get an application written in Haskell or Java to invoke a library written in C++."
Which in my opinion is not true for the reason I mentioned.
> Nothing from c++ ever gets exposed
Depends what's your definition for "getting exposed". If you mean "no C++ feature from the language gets exposed" then it's mostly true (you can still wrap certain things like allocators, though painful, but there's certain C++ features that have no real equivalent in some target languages indeed). But you can definitely expose the functionality of C++ code through a C interface.
That's definitely true. Can't have generics / compile time evaluation across languages. Need to design your code around that restriction ahead of time. SQLite being dynamically typed luckily doesn't have any problems with that.
I've actually run into a similar problem with a C library before, because it heavily used macros as part of its API. Glad most developers don't do that.
You do lose the ability to use some features, that's true. Mostly RAII around the interface. You can still leverage it internally in the implementation, and if using context objects it would be even easier. The main pain point is if you want to let client of the library use their own allocators. It's still doable, but quite a pain.
Classes can be wrapped with a bit of effort. You do need to write the constructors and the destructors manually and invoke a pair of new/delete on the C side, but it's just as you would handle a type allocated by a C library itself. You'd use it the same way. You just have the liberty to have the implementation use (mostly) C++.
> a high risk of being disrupted by those clients just using AI agents instead of paying $2-5000/day for a team of 20 barely-qualified new-grads in some far-off country
Is there any concrete evidence of that risk being high? That doesn't come from people whose job is to sell AI?
In a way, they really condensed perfectly a lot of what's silly currently around AI.
> Codex, Opus, Gemini try to build Counter Strike
Even though the prompt mentions Counter Strike, it actually asks to build the basics of a generic FPS, and with a few iterations ends up with some sort of minecraft-looking generic FPS with code that would never make it to prod anywhere sane.
It's technically impressive. But functionally very dubious (and not at all anything remotely close to Counter-Strike besides "being an FPS").
> Gee, how hard is to find SE experts in that particular combination of available ops tools?
You find expert in Ops, not in tools. People that know the fundamentals, not just the buttons to push in "certain situations" without knowing what's really going on under the hood.
Well a big reason this is missed is people discussing it are not part of these groups and mainly saw this as an annoyance.
I can agree that heavy & strict CoCs can be daunting and probably overkill for small open source projects. And they're far from flawless, as shown by the Rust mods resignation incidents. But to say they're useless and anti-meritocratic is to forget (and/or silence) these people that wanted to contribute in an environment where they wouldn't feel threatened (incidentally, sometimes despite being skillful contributors, so much so for the supposed meritocracy of the CoC-less projects).
I'm not sure strict CoCs are the answers to these real problems, but this feels like dismissing these problems altogether.
If you don't like the scope of the license especially with regards to the legal jurisdiction it sits under, then don't use it, don't use software under EUPL license, and call it a day?
reply