Extension modules are implemented in C because the interpreter is written in C. If it were written in another language, folks would write extension modules for that language instead. Also, it would be less relevant if people used portable C bindings like cffi, which are portable to PyPy and other interpreters… but they don’t.

At some point, reading kernel code is easier than speculating. The answer is actually 3. there are multiple semantics for filesystems in the VFS layer of the kernel. For example, XFS is the most prominent user of the “async” semantics; all transactions in XFS are fundamentally asynchronous. By comparison, something like ext4 uses the “standard” semantics, where actions are synchronous. These correspond to filling out different parts of the VFS structs and registering different handlers for different actions; they might as well be two distinct APIs. It is generally suspected that all filesystem semantics are broken in different ways.

Also, “hobby” is the wrong word; the lieutenant doing the yelling is paid to work on Linux and Debian. There are financial aspects to the situation; it’s not solely politics or machismo, although those are both on display.

Watch the video. Wedson is being yelled at by Ted Ts’o. If the general doesn’t yell, but his lieutenants yell, is that really progress? I will say that last time I saw Linus, he was very quiet and courteous, but that likely was because it was early morning and the summit-goers were starting to eat breakfast and drink their coffee.

How much more? When it comes to whether I’d write GPU drivers for money, I can tell you that LF doesn’t pay enough, Collabora doesn’t pay enough, Red Hat doesn’t pay enough, and Google illegally depressed my salary. Due to their shitty reputation, Apple, Meta, or nVidia cannot pay enough. And AMD only hires one open-source developer every few years. Special shoutout to Intel, who is too incompetent to consider as an employer.

I want to run PipeWire as a system user and have multiple login users access it. My current hack is to run it as one login user and then do something like:

export XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/1001

Where 1001 is the user ID. Is there a cleaner approach?

This is basically what you said here, and it’s still wrong: social dynamics, not money, is the main reason why young hackers (don’t) work on Linux. I’m starting to suspect that you’ve not hacked kernel before.

Well, I don’t want to pull the kernel-hacker card, but it sounds like you might not have experienced being yelled at by Linus during a kernel summit. It’s not fun and not worth the money. Also it’s well-known that LF can’t compete with e.g. Collabora or Red Hat on salary, so the only folks who stick around and focus on Linux infrastructure for the sake of Linux are bureaucrats, in the sense of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

I’ve been using NixOS for nearly a decade. It took me several days to understand the filesystem layout, and I had the advantage of knowing some capability theory beforehand. However, once I understood the Nix store, my paradigm shifted and I haven’t had any further “unexpected troubles.”

As far as I can tell, AppImages and Flatpaks are extraneous, heavy, improperly isolated, and propagate a sprawling filesystem which is hard to secure. Compare and contrast with Impermanent NixOS, which only persists data that the user has explicitly marked to be saved and has systemwide caching of installed applications.

Maybe you should actually try one before sharing your thoughts.

By induction, that will only make your user base stupider.

They have two. If the complaint is that neither wiki is as rich as the Gentoo or Arch wiki, consider that perhaps NixOS users don’t need as much supplementary advice for configuring their systems.

It’s been two decades. What kinks do you think NixOS has yet to iron out?

You’re not crazy or harsh. This is a very real problem. I have been stuck doing business development at every company I’ve worked for. There’s always some shitty load-bearing Django app whose schema determines what the business is capable of doing, and somebody’s gotta maintain it. It’s gotten to the point where I assume that any interesting things I do will be outside of work and not for pay.

You’re thinking of CPython. PyPy can routinely compete with C and C++, particularly in allocation-heavy or pointer-heavy scenarios.

You may be pleased to know that PyPy’s Python 2.7 branch will be maintained indefinitely, since PyPy is also written in Python 2.7. Also, if you can’t leave CPython yet, ActivePython’s team is publishing CPython 2.7 security patches.

It has nothing to do with knowing the language and everything to do with what’s outside of the language. C hasn’t resembled CPUs for decades and can’t be reasonably retrofitted for safety.

Your hands and wrists must not hurt yet. You’ll eventually come to see writing code as tedium.

C’mon, I think you have better reading comprehension than that. He’s a professional data scientist specializing in machine learning. He went to grad school, then to big industry, then to startups, and is currently running a consultancy. He is very clearly not “on the side of the road.” He’s merely telling executives to fuck off with their AI grift.

This shit is why I cannot recommend Truffle/Graal. Yes, it’s cool technology. Yes, it works well. Yes, I remember Chris Seaton. Yes, most of it is Free Software. However, Oracle is still the fucking lawnmower, and it’s not safe to build upon anything they can convince a judge they might own.

Alternatives include RPython (my preference) and also GNU Lightning.

Direct rendering infrastructure in Linux predates widespread use of “digital rights management” as a term of art by about two or three years. “We were here first,” as the saying goes. That said, the specific concept of direct rendering managers is a little newer, and probably was a mistake on its own merits, regardless of the name.