/tech/ - Technology

>>30075
>avoiding RPC.
There's also the complexity and performance cost of marshalling and unmarshalling data all over the place which thought recently ran into.
Something like Cap 'n Proto doesn't seem to have this problem.

2010 called.

>>30079
Ironically 8M And Constantly Swapping is pretty light compared to any editor with modern sensibilities. What do you think about the MicroEMACSen and other small clones like qemacs though?

>>30081
>Ironically 8M And Constantly Swapping is pretty light compared to any editor with modern sensibilities.
This is true.

>What do you think about the MicroEMACSen and other small clones like qemacs though?
These seem to be missing essential primitives, means of composition, and/or means of abstraction. Something like Edwin (a nice Old-English name) is closer in terms of small Emacsen, but alas MIT Scheme lacks the primitives (namely an interface to the outside world) to support a great text editor. (There have been attempts to port Edwin to portable R7RS which with SRFI has a partial interface to the outside world implemented.) Had mg installed on my computer at one point, and it's nice that it was tractable.

>>30087
The other problem with Edwin of course is that it's very unpopular, and so doesn't have all the packages which make Emacs a great.

>>30088
>packages
Honestly modern FSF Emacs is a clusterfuck and the package ecosystem is a culprit as well. For example the ada-mode package refuses to compile on my machine, while the XEmacs equivalent works flawlessly. Moving from elisp parsing to brittle helper programs seems to have been a mistake (except for slime of course, everyone loves slime).

>>30092
reimplementing parsers for every text-editor in every language doesn't seem like a good idea.
would think compilers would want to make there parsers available for text-editors to use.

>>30093
Then again having the compiler implement a standardized parse-tree to rat on the implementation details may be too much to ask.

last time I looked at suckless it was full of chvds, including one of its contributors whining about cultural marxism on lobste.rs

>>30105
isn't every community of programming hobbyists either full of rightoids, lead by a wokechvd committee, or has an uneasy truce between the two? it's easy to find high-profile chuds, ancraps and otherwise terrible people in the software minimalism niche, but you also see people like the antix lead dev, leahneukirchen or most often some inoffensive lib, who at most complains about "software freedom" and "goverment surveillance" sometimes.

another thread full of platitudes and discourse disguised as technical discussion. no concrete criticism or alternative projects, just vibes

>>30105
the guys are neonazis and I don't understand why anyone takes them seriously. their stuff is lazy, not minimalist, there is no reason to use dwm instead of writing your own window manager. you can read an xlib/xcb tutorial and write something better (with runtime configuration, for example) in less than a week. literally just go to github.com/explore and search for window managers

open source and "minimalism" appeal to the idea of the lone programmer and inventor, they obviously attract and even foster a petite bourgeois mentality like small businesses. but this mindset is even more aggro and virulent than that of the small owner because the material circumstances of the oss maintainer are more precarious. there is nothing stopping companies or other developers from appropriating their work and making a superior alternative, basically taking over their place. this pathetic position is why they lash out so violently against "the woke", "code of conduct", "trains" and whatever other culture war boogeyman redundant classification, the culture war itself is fake and a distraction

personally I claim to be trans on my github and codeberg profiles to keep chuds away from my projects

>>30107
>their stuff is lazy, not minimalist
You have to be a programmer yourself to appreciate how cutting complexity at the right places can make software infinitely more predictable and easier to modify. See http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html for the social problems this creates.

DWMs design could be described as orthodox new jersey, by only coding in the few features everyone needs and writing patches for a couple of others. The status bar is accessible through x11 properties, using dmenu and sxhkd for launcher and hotkey functionality respectively is sound, the lack of any interfaces to window placement is objectively a bad design decision. Ultimately suckless programs are just small utilities done right, they're generally pleasant to work with unless you have legacy requirements, nothing on the level of elegance as s6 or qmail though. My personal window manager is fvwm, it's not pretty but has a nice featureset.

>>30109
>You have to be a programmer yourself to appreciate how cutting complexity at the right places can make software infinitely more predictable and easier to modify
there's a limit to how much you can do this. but yeah a lot of FOSS projects suffer from NIH, rather than just linking to other free libraries for functionality

>>30106
Just look for the ones with queers and furries in them, sparkledogs scare away the chuds and HOA officers like cats on a ship.

>>30109
brother I have written my own window manager, you are just saying words
it is laziness and not minimalism because it lack features and not because it would worsen the code or make it harder to maintain but because they didn't have the energy to write them. another example: the patch thingy instead of an actual module system - it is unjustifiable

>using x11 features
literally bad design and it breaks the pretense of minimalism even further. your design ends up conceptually more convoluted because it depends on the arbitrary set of features of a very bloated dependency

>>30131
what wayland compositor do you use?

>>30107
>the material circumstances of the oss maintainer are more precarious. there is nothing stopping companies or other developers from appropriating their work and making a superior alternative, basically taking over their place.
While I agree that making the same shit over and over again (for example them making quark while darkhttpd existing and being superior to it with the same codebase size) is petit bourgeois but I don't think they have more precarious conditions than the petit bourgeois since almost none of them make their living off their OSS projects, and so other person forking their work and making improving it isn't detrimental to them, since they don't lose anything (and most of the times this never happens)

Every 2012 minimalism fanatic I knew either went chud or embraced bloat or both.

>>30122
trvke

It’s getting to the sad point where people are drawn into software minimalism based on the politics of its advocates first, rather than from a considered technical perspective. It leads into a lot of the discussion revolving around treating “bloat” like it’s a tax on computer recourses to fund DEI hiring in whichever foundation leads a given OSS project.

>clean code makes you a chud
lol wtf is this thread

>>30163
Yes. Unironically. See /g/ and the various threads complaining about how their Sandy Bridge machine is starting to chug running a full OS in 2025 because of women and Jews.

>>30164
cant imagine being a bigger loser than caring what some dying website thinks. same retardation as people who refuse to watch a movie or play some game because of "the fandom"

>>30165
It's not that I care, it's just observably the case that throughout the 2010s to 2025 the advocacy and support for software minimalism has depended more on political reasonings than technical ones.

>>30167
and your evidence for this is fucking 4chan?

>>30168
Why are you getting so heated over it? Advocacy for minimalism isn't found in many places beyond 4chan and some IRCs, most of the tech industry doesn't abide by software minimalism principles and thus neither do tech forums advocate for it outside of generally expressing annoyance with how slow software has gotten.

>>30169

not true, just look at youtube, for example. or. ironically, places like discord… plenty of people that want their pseudo-minimalism. (real minimalism is going outside and touching grass btw)

Minimalism is good if it doesn’t go too far. The primary reason why programs are even made in the first place is that they are supposed to be useful. Minimalism is good if it means modularity and lower system resource usage. The st terminal is good example of this because it does what it's supposed to do and it does it well. In theory, it can even avoid some future exploits because terminal escape codes are kind scary.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T2Al3jdY38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4A7KMQEmfo

<flame>
It's also known that larger codebase means that's there is higher probability of bugs and it's much harder to even audit or understand large codebases. Just look at Systemd. It does a bunch of unrelated shit, such as…
>sudo (run0)
>logs (why not just use existing logger programs?)
>acpi (why not just acpid?)
>bootloader (why it does have to be a part of a init and process supervisor?)
>DNS and resolved? (why it's not standalone?)
>and more.
Source: systemd documentation and https://suckless.org/sucks/systemd/

Also, it's kinda funny that in Debian, poweroff command is prohibited but you can use systemctl poweroff as a regular user. I want to also point out that the attempted xz-utils backdoor also required a custom downstream patch to OpenSSH that enabled integration with systemd-notify: https://gist.github.com/thesamesam/223949d5a074ebc3dce9ee78baad9e27

If you ask what's the real alternative, then? I would suggest Runit or S6. It's commonly said that those weren't available back when most project adopted Systemd but it's not true because OpenRC and Runit did exists. Some say that Systemd is faster but that isn't actually true because Systemd does something special. The real reason is that sysvinit didn't (usually) parallelize daemon startup but it could be done with sysvinit/daemontools (hack-ish) or Runit or OpenRC (or most other modern init systems). I agree that that sysvinit had to be replaced because it's just not very convenient or user friendly to use.
</flame>

>>30162
> It leads into a lot of the discussion revolving around treating “bloat” like it’s a tax on computer recourses to fund DEI hiring
lol you're not using a metaphor, spreadsheet derangement is real. Literally the same Silicon Valley neoliberal ideology being pushed at DOGE:
<Linux users: "I want my computer to be at 1% usage at all times, its disgusting to imagine me spending my resources on anything I want to do!"
<Musk: "its horrible to imagine Congress spending money on pork, its disgusting to imagine my resources being wasted on anything that working class people want to do!"

>>30197
>>30198
Tbh I don’t really get the idea of minimalism = low system resources, because since day one of electronic computers existing there has been a desire to provide a virtual machine to act as a more user friendly abstraction to what the actual hardware is doing, even if you’re writing a whole program in modern x86-64 assembly, the instructions aren’t exactly 1-to-1 representations of what the underlying hardware does and can do with the instructions being represented by microcode and often encapsulating multiple cycles to achieve whatever the instruction does.

Interpreted languages are also as old as compiled languages even despite the extremely tight resources computers had at the time, many domain specific languages rose during the mid-20th century to further provide a simpler and quicker way to get things done on a computer.

Despite a lot of the simping for the old school within computer science and their wizardry for making software with a binary of bytes running on machines with mere kilobytes of memory, it seems like those figures in the field were always trying to make computers as abstracted as technically possible and while the optimisation they achieved in working towards that goal is incredible, focusing on that in the belief that was the minimalism that was sought feels rather like missing the forest for the trees.

>>30197
> Just look at Systemd. It does a bunch of unrelated shit
Systemd is a deamon suite. No single programm does all of the above.
You may just as well argue that "linux" is a bloated OS because you collect the entire system a single giant unit.
> Runit
I use Void Linux for my server and runit made me miss systemd unironically. It's absolutely terrible, but I don''t have the time and energy to migrate to Oracle Linux (I need btrfs).
> S6
Tried it once for use in containers. Not a fan of it from what I've seen.

>>30220
>You may just as well argue that "linux" is a bloated OS because you collect the entire system a single giant unit.
A microkernel is certainly more suckless/minimal than a monolithic kernel.

>>30221
Typically the suckless people do argue that the Linux kernel is bloated, but want a small monolithic kernel like plan9.

>>30345
Well I can't imagine that a microkernel is actually minimal nor keeping it simple stupid, since otherwise we'd not have to keep calling the bastard GNU/Linux because GNU would be using the Hurd.

>>30347
But a microkernel is more aligned with the UNIX philosophy.
I have heard that the issue with Hurd is that they are perfectionists, not that they can't get a microkernel working. Doesn't harmonyOS (huawei OS) have a microkernel?

>>30220
>It's absolutely terrible
What do you mean by this? The daemontools approach to service supervision is unambiguously superior to cgroups monitoring and other hacks systemd uses (see http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html). Runit sits on the lower end of daemontools derivatives, nosh is another one that can run systemd unit files http://jdebp.uk./Softwares/nosh/worked-example.html