I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.
Are there any instances of this happening? Where something is designed with a flaw that doesn’t get realized until much later, necessitating scrapping the whole thing and starting from scratch?
Happens all the time on Linux. The current instance would be the shift from X11 to Wayland.
The first thing I noticed was when the audio system switched from OSS to ALSA.
And then ALSA to all those barely functional audio daemons to PulseAudio, and then again to PipeWire. That sure one took a few tries to figure out right.
And the strangest thing about that is that neither PulseAudio nor Pipewire are replacing anything. ALSA and PulseAudio are still there while I handle my audio through Pipewire.
How is PulseAudio still there? I mean, sure the protocol is still there, but it’s handled by
pipewire-pulseon most systems nowadays(KDE specifically requires PipeWire).Also, PulseAudio was never designed to replace ALSA, it’s sitting on top of ALSA to abstract some complexity from the programs, that would arise if they were to use ALSA directly.
Pulse itself is not there but its functionality is (and they even preserved its interface and pactl). PipeWire is a superset of audio features from Pulse and Jack combined with video.
For anyone wondering: Alsa does sound card detection and basic IO at the kernel level, Pulse takes ALSA devices and does audio mixing at the user/system level. Pipe does what Pulse does but more and even includes video devices
And then from ALSA to PulseAudio haha
They’re at different layers of the audio stack though so not really replacing.
there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite.
I think this was the main reason for the Wayland project. So many issues with Xorg that it made more sense to start over, instead of trying to fix it in Xorg.
according to kagiGPT…
~~i have determined that wayland is the successor and technically minimal:
*Yes, it is possible to run simple GUI programs without a full desktop environment or window manager. According to the information in the memory:You can run GUI programs with just an X server and the necessary libraries (such as QT or GTK), without needing a window manager or desktop environment installed. [1][2]
The X server handles the basic graphical functionality, like placing windows and handling events, while the window manager is responsible for managing the appearance and behavior of windows. [3][4]
Some users prefer this approach to avoid running a full desktop environment when they only need to launch a few GUI applications. [5][6]
However, the practical experience may not be as smooth as having a full desktop environment, as you may need to manually configure the environment for each GUI program. [7][8]*~~
however… firefox will not run without the full wayland compositor.
correction:
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Wayland is not a display server like X11, but rather a protocol that describes how applications communicate with a compositor directly. [1]
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Display servers using the Wayland protocol are called compositors, as they combine the roles of the X window manager, compositing manager, and display server. [2]
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A Wayland compositor combines the roles of the X window manager, compositing manager, and display server. Most major desktops support Wayland compositors. [3]
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There is some Rust code that needs to be rewritten in C.
Bold
Italics
I feel tracked… Better strike this all through
Strange. I’m not exactly keeping track. But isn’t the current going in just the opposite direction? Seems like tons of utilities are being rewritten in Rust to avoid memory safety bugs
You got it right, the person you replied to made a joke.
The more the code is used, the faster it ought to be. A function for an OS kernel shouldn’t be written in Python, but a calculator doesn’t need to be written in assembly, that kind of thing.
I can’t really speak for Rust myself but to explain the comment, the performance gains of a language closer to assembly can be worth the headache of dealing with unsafe and harder to debug languages.
Linux, for instance, uses some assembly for the parts of it that need to be blazing fast. Confirming assembly code as bug-free, no leaks, all that, is just worth the performance sometimes.
But yeah I dunno in what cases rust is faster than C/C++.
C/C++ isn’t really faster than Rust. That’s the attraction of Rust; safety AND speed.
Of course it also depends on the job.
https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/box-plot-summary-charts.html
C/C++ isn’t
You’re talking about two languages, one is C, the other is C++. C++ is not a superset of C.
Yes thank you. But my statement remains true nevertheless.
Rust is faster than C. Iterators and mutable noalias can be optimized better. There’s still FORTRAN code in use because it’s noalias and therefore faster
But yeah I dunno in what cases rust is faster than C/C++.
First of all C and C++ are very different, C is faster than C++. Rust is not intrinsically faster than C in the same way that C is faster than C++, however there’s a huge difference, safety.
Imagine the following C function:
void do_something(Person* person);Are you sure that you can pass NULL? Or that it won’t delete your object? Or delete later? Or anything, you need to know what the function does to be sure and/or perform lots of tests, e.g. the proper use of that function might be something like:
if( person ) { person_uses++; do_something(person); } ... if( --person_uses == 0 ) free( person )That’s a lot more calls than just calling the function, but it’s also a lot more secure.
In C++ this is somewhat solved by using smart pointers, e.g.
void do_something(std::unique_ptr<Person> person); void something_else(std::shared_ptr<Person> person);That’s a lot more secure and readable, but also a lot slower. Rust achieves the C++ level of security and readability using only the equivalent of a single C call by performing pre-compile analysis and making the assembly both fast and secure.
Can the same thing be done on C? Absolutely, you could use macros instead of ifs and counters and have a very fast and safe code but not easy to read at all. The thing is Rust makes it easy to write fast and safe code, C is faster but safe C is slower, and since you always want safe code Rust ends up being faster for most applications.
Agree, call me unreasonable or whatever but I just don’t like Rust nor the community behind it. Stop trying to reinvent the wheel! Rust makes everything complicated.
On the other hand… Zig 😘
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Zig!!
Zig!!
Starting anything from scratch is a huge risk these days. At best you’ll have something like the python 2 -> 3
rewriteoverhaul (leaving scraps of legacy code all over the place), at worst you’ll have something like gnome/kde (where the community schisms rather than adopting a new standard). I would say that most of the time, there are only two ways to get a new standard to reach mass adoption.-
Retrofit everything. Extend old APIs where possible. Build your new layer on top of https, or javascript, or ascii, or something else that already has widespread adoption. Make a clear upgrade path for old users, but maintain compatibility for as long as possible.
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Buy 99% of the market and declare yourself king (cough cough chromium).
Python 3 wasn’t a rewrite, it just broke compatibility with Python 2.
In a good way. Using a non-verified bytes type for strings was such a giant source of bugs. Text is complicated and pretending it isn’t won’t get you far.
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The entire thing. It needs to be completely rewritten in rust, complete with unit tests and Miri in CI, and converted to a high performance microkernel. Everything evolves into a crab /s
I laughed waay too hard at this.
A PM said something similar earlier this week during a performance meeting: “I heard rust was fast. Maybe we should rewrite the software in that?”
They must have been a former Duke Nukem Forever project manager
Why not Ironclad( written in Ada) ? https://ironclad.nongnu.org/
Had me in the first half ngl
Maybe not exaclly Linux, sorry for that, but it was first thing that get to my mind.
Web browsers really should be rewritten, be more modular and easier to modify. Web was supposed to be bulletproof and work even if some features are not present, but all websites are now based on assumptions all browsers have 99% of Chromium features implemented and won’t work in any browser written from scratch now.The same guys who create Chrome have stuffed the web standards with needlessly bloated fluff that makes it nearly impossible for anyone else to implement it. If alternative browsers have to be a thing again, we need a new standard, or at least the current standard with significantly large portions removed.
we need to just rebuild the web, built on a decentralized LoRa or such mesh network.
WWW ≠ Internet.
Internet has some things to be fixed too (https://secushare.org/broken-internet), but is not as doomed as the web.
Agreed. I mean, metadata should be protocol stuff, not document stuff. And rendering (font size etc) should be user side, not developer side. Browser should be modular, not a monolith. Creating a webpage should be easy again.
If you want a browser truly written “from scratch”, you need to check-out Ladybird:
Linux does this all the time.
ALSA -> Pulse -> Pipewire
Xorg -> Wayland
GNOME 2 -> GNOME 3
Every window manager, compositor, and DE
GIMP 2 -> GIMP 3
SysV init -> SystemD
OpenSSL -> BoringSSL
Twenty different kinds of package manager
Many shifts in popular software
BoringSSL is not a drop-in replacement for openssl though:
BoringSSL is a fork of OpenSSL that is designed to meet Google’s needs.
Although BoringSSL is an open source project, it is not intended for general use, as OpenSSL is. We don’t recommend that third parties depend upon it. Doing so is likely to be frustrating because there are no guarantees of API or ABI stability.
Aren’t different kinds of package managers required due to the different stability requirements of a distro?
We haven’t rewritten the firewall code lately, right? checks Oh, it looks like we have. Now it’s nftables.
I learned ipfirewall, then ipchains, then iptables came along, and I was like, oh hell no, not again. At that point I found software to set up the firewall for me.
Damn, you’re old. iptables came out in 1998. That’s what I learned in (and I still don’t fully understand it).
UFW → nftables/iptables. Never worry about chains again
I was just thinking that iptables lasted a good 20 years. Over twice that of ipchains. Was it good enough or did it just have too much inertia?
Nf is probably a welcome improvement in any case.
GUI toolkits like Qt and Gtk. I can’t tell you how to do it better, but something is definitely wrong with the standard class hierarchy framework model these things adhere to. Someday someone will figure out a better way to write GUIs (or maybe that already exists and I’m unaware) and that new approach will take over eventually, and all the GUI toolkits will have to be scrapped or rewritten completely.
Idk man, I’ve used a lot of UI toolkits, and I don’t really see anything wrong with GTK (though they do basically rewrite it from scratch every few years it seems…)
The only thing that comes to mind is the React-ish world of UI systems, where model-view-controller patterns are more obvious to use. I.e. a concept of state where the UI automatically re-renders based on the data backing it
But generally, GTK is a joy, and imo the world of HTML has long been trying to catch up to it. It’s only kinda recently that we got flexbox, and that was always how GTK layouts were. The tooling, design guidelines, and visual editors have been great for a long time
I’ve really fallen in love with the Iced framework lately. It just clicks.
A modified version of it is what System76 is using for the new COSMIC DE
Newer toolkits all seem to be going immediate mode. Which I kind of hate as an idea personally.
er, do you have an example. This is not a trend I was aware of
and all the GUI toolkits will have to be scrapped or rewritten completely
Dillo is the only tool i know still using FLTK.
NUKE
https://www.foundry.com/products/nuke-family/nuke
Also, while a bit of a surprise, FLTK is migrating to Wayland.
lol that someone already said Wayland.
Your welcome. :)
His welcome?
That’ll teach me to type when I’m mad. “You’re”. There a go.
Actually, it won’t teach me. Wayland’s mere existence will bother me till the day I die, I’m sure. Especially once it’s working well enough for me to have to adopt it. The resentment will grow.
It’s actually a classic programmer move to start over again. I’ve read the book “Clean Code” and it talks about a little bit.
Appereantly it would not be the first time that the new start turns into the same mess as the old codebase it’s supposed to replace. While starting over can be tempting, refactoring is in my opinion better.
If you refactor a lot, you start thinking the same way about the new code you write. So any new code you write will probably be better and you’ll be cleaning up the old code too. If you know you have to clean up the mess anyways, better do it right the first time …
However it is not hard to imagine that some programming languages simply get too old and the application has to be rewritten in a new language to ensure continuity. So I think that happens sometimes.
Yeah, this was something I recognized about myself in the first few years out of school. My brain always wanted to say “all of this is a mess, let’s just delete it all and start from scratch” as though that was some kind of bold/smart move.
But I now understand that it’s the mark of a talented engineer to see where we are as point A, where we want to be as point B, and be able to navigate from A to B before some deadline (and maybe you have points/deadlines C, D, E, etc.). The person who has that vision is who you want in charge.
Chesterton’s Fence is the relevant analogy: “you should never destroy a fence until you understand why it’s there in the first place.”
I’d counter that with monolithic, legacy apps without any testing trying to refactor can be a real pain.
I much prefer starting from scratch, while trying to avoid past mistakes and still maintaining the old app until new up is ready. Then management starts managing and new app becomes old app. Rinse and repeat.
The difference between the idiot and the expert, is the expert knows why the fences are there, and can do the rewrite without having to relearn lessons. But if you’re supporting a package you didn’t originally write, a rewrite is much harder.
Which is something I always try to explain to juniors: writing code is cool, but for your sake learn how to READ code.
Not just understanding what it does, but what was it all meant to do. Even reading your own code is a skill that needs some focus.
Side note: I hate it to my core when people copy code mindlessly. Sometimes it’s not even a bug, or a performance issue, but something utterly stupid and much harder to read. But because they didn’t understand it, and didn’t even try, they just copy-pasted it and went on. Ugh.
Side note: I hate it to my core when people copy code mindlessly
Get ready for the world of AI code assist 😬
Hah yeah, this was in the back of my mind. I forgot the context of it, though, thanks.
“you should never destroy a fence until you understand why it’s there in the first place.”
I like that; really makes me think about my time in building-games.
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Alsa > Pulseaudio > Pipewire
About 20 xdg-open alternatives (which is, btw, just a wrapper around gnome-open, exo-open, etc.)
My session scripts after a deep dive. Seriously, startxfce4 has workarounds from the 80ies and software rot affected formatting already.
Turnstile instead elogind (which is bound to systemd releases)
mingetty, because who uses a modem nowadays?
Pulseaudio doesn’t replace ALSA. Pulseaudio replaces esd and aRts
those last two are just made up words
All words are made up
Except naturally occurring, discovered, onomatopoeic words such as bang, boom, cuckoo, tweet, drip, splish, splash, slosh.
Right, sorry.
ALSA is based
About 20 xdg-open alternatives (which is, btw, just a wrapper around gnome-open, exo-open, etc.)
I use handlr-regex, is it bad? It was the only thing I found that I could use to open certain links on certain web applications (like android does), using exo-open all links just opened on the web browser instead.
If you like it, then it’s not bad.
Be careful what you wish for. I’ve been part of some rewrites that turned out worse than the original in every way. Not even code quality was improved.
In corporations, we call that job security.
Just rewriting the same thing in different ways for little gain except to say we did it
Funnily enough the current one is actually the one where we’ve made the biggest delta and it’s been worthwhile in every way. When I joined the oldest part of the platform was 90s .net and MSSQL. This summer we’re turning the last bits off.
Cough, wayland, cough (X is just old and wayland is better)
Alt text: Thomas Jefferson thought that every law and every constitution should be torn down and rewritten from scratch every nineteen years–which means X is overdue.
Some form of stable, modernized bluetooth stack would be nice. Every other bluetooth update breaks at least one of my devices.
I realize that’s not exactly what you asked for but Pipewire had been incredibly stable for me. Difference between the absolute nightmare of using BT devices with alsa and super smooth experience in pipewire is night and day.
