Taken from the wikipedia page on rust:

On February 8, 2021, the formation of the Rust Foundation was announced by its five founding companies (AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla).[36][37] In a blog post published on April 6, 2021, Google announced support for Rust within the Android Open Source Project as an alternative to C/C++.[38]

Four out of five founding companies are evil to the bone, with only Mozilla being somewhat reputable. That does not give me much confidence, sadly.

On November 22, 2021, the Moderation Team, which was responsible for enforcing community standards and the Code of Conduct, announced their resignation “in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves[39]”

How am I not surprised?

In May 2022, the Rust Core Team, other lead programmers, and certain members of the Rust Foundation board implemented governance reforms in response to the incident.[40]

At least that. However, I don’t care enough for the time being to spend my morning on reading what exactly they implemented.

Thanks for laying out your concerns. As a C++ developer who does not know the other languages you speak of (I assume Rust, Go), I can agree to some of your points, but also some of them I see differently:

1. C++ can be complex, because it has a lot of features and especially the newer standards have brought some syntax that is hard to understand or read at times. However, those elements are not frequently used, or if they are, the developer will get used to them quickly & they won’t make development slow. As a matter of fact, most development time should be spent on thinking about algorithms, and thinking very well before implementing them - and until implementation, the language does not matter. I do not think that language complexity leads to increased bugs per se. My biggest project is just short of 40k lines of code, and most of the bugs I produced were the classical “off by one” or missing range checks, bugs that you can just as well produce in other languages.

2. C++ no longer requires you to do manual memory management - that is what smart pointers are for, and RAII-programming.

3. I can’t make a qualified comment on that, due to lack of expertise - you might be right.

4. You’re somewhat repeating point 1) here with slow development. But you raise a good point: web standards have become insane in terms of quantity and interface sizes. Everyone and their dog wants to reinvent the wheel. That in itself requires a very large team to support I would say. As stated for point 1), I do not agree development in C++ has to be slower

5. True, as someone who just suffered from problems introduced on windows (cygwin POSIX message queues implementation got broken by Win10, and inotify does not work on Windows Subsystem for Linux) I can confirm that while the C++ standard library is not much of a problem, the moment you interface with the host OS, you leave the standard realm and it becomes “zombieland”. Also, for some reason, the realtime library implementation on MacOS is different, breaking some very simple time-based functions. So yeah, that’s annoying to circumvent, but can be done by creating platform specific wrapper libraries that create a uniform API. For other languages, it appears this is done by the compilers, which is probably better - meaning the I/O operations got taken into those language’s core features

6. I am highly doubtful of people relying on garbage collection - a programmer that doesn’t know exactly when his objects come into existence, and when they cease to exist is likely to make much bigger mistakes and produce very inefficient code. The aforementioned smart pointers in C++ solve this issue: object lifetime is the scope of the smart pointer declaration, and for shared pointers, object lifetime expires when the last process using it leaves the scope in which it is declared. For concurrent programming, I do not know if you mean concurrency (threads) or multiple people working on the same project. While multi-threading can be a bit “weird” at first, you have a lot of control over shared variables and memory barriers in C++ that might enable a team to produce a browser that is much faster, which I believe is a core requirement towards modern browsers

As for your tl;dr: definitely not “less concurrency”, that makes no sense. The other points may or may not be true, keeping in mind the answers I gave above.

Not sure if you are trying to be funny, but if not: enlighten us?

Strong “frog in water being slowly brought to boiling” vibes :(

This here. As a European I am extremely worried about what is coming in US politics. I really really hope Biden will make use of this with foolproof consequences.

If people rely on their imaginary friend, we’re so fucked…

Ich lehne Gewalt ab, aber ein paar Backpfeifen könnten dem Lindner nur gut tun.

Ist das nicht der Arsch, der den Rückkauf unseres Stromnetzes sabotiert hat?

Generally a good take, I just wished you hadn’t used the word “race”, because the concept of race itself is only a thing among racists, and we should not use that kind of language.

Scandinavia has always been very left side

Maybe from a hard neo nazi perspective. Denmark and Sweden especially have right-wing extremist parties (Denmark Democrats + New Right + Danish People’s Party together ~= 14.3%, Sweden Democrats 17.5%) with a voter base that has been established over a longer time. The German right wing populists have risen to that level only in recent elections, which is frightening. Geert Wilders is not “the new guy” from the Netherlands, he’s been a populist rightwing piece of shit for decades. Unfortunately, the average Dutch person over 40 / outside university towns is also quite racist under the surface - I lived there for 4 years, speak fluent Dutch with a German accent and since they felt “safe” with their bigotry around me, I have heard enough racist and sexist bullshit from “average middle class” Dutch people that I didn’t feel comfortable in that country anymore. The young people in urban centres are okay, but unfortunately those are not a large enough demographic.

As for comparing with the US - maybe not a good idea: Even young US americans see the democrats for the corporate shills they are, and know that they have to vote for them just to prevent a Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 becoming a documentary.

The US are the scary example for Western Europe as “this will happen here if you don’t pay attention”. No one in Europe will be able to say “I didn’t know” when we slip into a totalitarian regime filled with hate and controlled by corporations, because it might be happening in front of our eyes with a ~10 year headstart in the US. I just hope that’s not what is going to happen in the end, but things have progressed far too much into the worst dystopian future thinkable for this century.

I’m a big fan of any country voting against the populist trend, so I may ask for asylum in Finland eventually. Although, despite my motivation to learn new languages, that might be a challenge :)

we’re our own kind of fucked up over here :( Except the Finns, the Finns are cool.

My trivial (non legal ;) answer is: If you are working for a corporation that is looking to patent something / make something closed license: the moment you ever looked at a single line of my code relevant to what you are doing, you are forbidden from releasing under any more restrictive license. If you are a private person working on open source? Then you be the judge whether you copied enough of my code that you believe it is more than just “inspired by”.

For most of history you would be better off if you could kill the next village over.

That is an incredibly stupid take. For most of history, the planet was so vast that people had plenty of room to hunt / farm / whatever. And no, killing other humans is not in our DNA, the only people who feel like that are those with brain damage / development defects.

again, I don’t have a problem with copying code - but I as a developer know whether I took enough of someone else’s algorithm so that I should mention the original authorship :) My only problem with circumventing licenses is when people put more restrictive licenses on plagiarized code.

And - I guess - in conclusion, if someone makes a license too free, so that putting a restrictive (commercial) license or patent on plagiarized / derived work, that is also something I don’t want to see.

As I am a big proponent of open source, there is nothing wrong even with copying code - the point is that you should not be allowed to claim something as your own idea and definitely not to claim copyright on code that was “inspired” by someone else’s work. The easiest solution would be to forbid patents on software (and patents altogether) completely. The only purpose that FOSS licenses have is to prevent corporations from monetizing the work under the license.

“Why does no one say murder is bad unless China is murdering”

I can not fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.

Let me try to help, once:

“Why do most people not complain about murder when Microsoft is doing it, but when China is doing it, the very justified outrage can be heard?”

I am also sick to the core about this aspect of humanity. I feel that we as a species are just about developed enough to understand how a better world would look like, and how people should act, what’s “the right thing to do” - and very much not developed enough to overcome our egoism and narcissism to make it happen, so we do the wrong thing despite knowing better far too often.

With the obligatory “fuck everyone who disregards open source licenses”, I am still slightly amused at this raising eyebrows while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM, which will help circumvent licenses & copyrights by the bazillion.

whatever you need to tell yourself to not have to self-reflect the bullshit you are spouting…