Excuse me, what?

I’ve been compiling apps depending on newer Qt and/or kdelibs versions for ages (back when the repository was literally called “kdelibs”, about 20 years ago).

This has never been an issue for me. Even with autoconf/automake, I just compiled everything to its own prefix, so it doesn’t interfere with the system at all. You don’t even need to fix the build system in the cases where it’s broken/lacks features, if you leverage all the “path” variables (CPATH, LIBRARY_PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, etc.). But autotools, cmake, qmake, and every build system I’ve used so far supports this out of the box.

Not claiming it’s a skill issue, but I have to say I’m very surprised by reading any of this.

Specifically, for Debian, I was told 20 years ago by a very wise person “you never do make install on Debian, specially not for the kernel”, and taught me how to use make-kpkg (or something like that, I don’t remember the name of the tool), which was a way to make a debian package of a self built kernel, which is obviously something that can’t be installed to its own prefix.

Related: There is an article on LWN called Lua and Python, which is mostly about the approach of the two languages WRT being “batteries included” or not.

I think Lua being a bit barebones is 100% fine… if you just pair it with a good helper library, or set of libraries with a coherent API, that allows it to thrive. Then you can either use the framework library or not, depending on whether your project requires the extras, or can do without.

As a parallel, I’ve been doing C++ development for almost two decades, and I cannot imagine doing anything non-trivial without Qt. For example, Qt has a debug framework that pretty prints automatically most containers, and adds the newline also automatically. Also, QString is an actual string type, whereas std::string is more like QByteArray. It’s functionality that it’s essential for me (and it’s just the minimal examples… then Qt has all the GUI functionality, of course, but I use Qt even in console-only programs!).

This is surely opinionated on my side, and most C++ devs don’t see it this way, but my point is that a language with a “core experience” that it’s lackluster to you should not be a bad thing if the language is capable enough to provide an ecosystem with a good 3rd party library that adds exactly what you want. In the Lua ecosystem that maybe it’s Penlight.

But I totally get your point. Penlight doesn’t even seem to have a math library, so I found no round implementation there. This can be not a problem for some, but deal breaking for others.

I’ve wanted to start a project in Rust, but for the ideas that I have (and the time that I have for a hobby project, as for work it’s rarely starting a new one, but continuing and existing one), Rust seemed a viable, but not ideal alternative to just doing it all in C++, for which I already have enough knowledge and very well proven libraries. I will look again soon, and I will keep looking because eventually something will surely click, it’s just that so far, the time has not been right.

Note that my point is not that it’s unusable for everyone. Just that it’s false that “some people just can’t seem to let [C or C++] go”, as the previous comment said. I can’t let go something that works well for something that doesn’t, given the projects that I have to work on.

It’s just time to move on from C/C++, but some people just can’t seem to let go.

The Rust community has 2 websites that I keep periodically checking: Are we game yet? and Are we GUI yet?. The answers on those sites are respectively (as of February 2024, when this comment is written) “Almost. We have the blocks, bring your own glue” and “The roots aren’t deep but the seeds are planted”. I’ve seen the progress in Bevy and Slint, but it’s still the same, those websites don’t change, and my situation WRT to making a Rust project for fun or work it’s the same.

I’ll be happy to start doing Rust projects whenever I get the chance (which will be when it’s a sufficient tool for my use cases). But I’m tired of smoke sellers.

Radon, the “handwriting” one, seems like if someone wanted to have Comic Sans but for code.

I heard the rumor that Linux desktop environments use it too. Now hopefully multimedia apps with 3 letters like VLC and OBS can adopt it too.

j/k