I would have preferred Rust, a language created by Mozilla instead of one with ties to Apple, but I’m not a dev so I can’t really judge. What are your thoughts?

  • JustMarkov@lemmy.ml
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    3 months ago

    I would have preferred Rust, a language created by Mozilla instead of one with ties to Apple, but I’m not dev so I can’t really judge. What are your thoughts?

    I don’t know anything about Swift, but people like to ignore the fact, that Rust is not entirely free, as it fails to exercise freedom 3.
    tl;dr: Rust Foundation don’t want you to apply modifications to their language without “explicit approval”.
    And you are also limited to share modified versions of their software.

    (If someone can imply, that Python and Perl have similiar restriction — they are not the same, because both of their trademarks protect usage of software against fraud, but you can freely patch and modify it.)

    For me personally, seeing LadyBird not choosing Rust as their main language is very promising. Rust software is everywhere now and this is concerning.

    • turnipjs@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      That… is not a restriction on freedom 3. You could complain about your inability to use the rust name for anything you want but that is not the same thing as your ability to distribute modified versions of the software. It is also fairly standard practice for foss software to restrict the use of such trademarks. For example, Gnome does pretty much the same thin. FreeBSD as well. Libre Office also has similar restrictions, although they are defined more nebulously. It is not clear to me what usages are allowed with the Linux trademark but they certainly do restrict who can use it and for what and you must get permission before using it. See also, about trademarks in FOSS: https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=9d96e1bf-bced-48f7-b5b4-ee561e7a9348

      The software is free. The trademarks are not. The four freedoms are about the software and not about trademarks. You could fork Rust and call it Corrosion, just like people have forked Firefox and called it Waterfox.

    • asudox@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      There’s a reason why software is being made with Rust now. It has the speed of C++ (sometimes faster), has a nice syntax, is memory safe by default, has the best compiler error messages and also the book is very good. I learnt entirely by the book and it’s very good at explaining things.