Spyke

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linux

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I Finally Tried Niri, The New Way Of Tiling Linux Users Are Going Crazy About

And crucially, it is written entirely in Rust. Which could be a deciding point for some.

I am a programmer, and in my opinion, unless you are planning at looking at the source code and don't want to mess with other languages, you as a user should not care about whether the program you're about to use is written in Rust.

::: spoiler Wall of text with context Rust has become popular among programming enthusiasts due to resulting in fast programs while avoiding memory management problems that come from using some other "fast" languages such as C. Not just that, but Rust achieves that while also avoiding the most common approach to this problem, which is garbage collection. Garbage collection is often seen as slow, despite, when compared to C's manual memory management, garbage collection not being that far behind when well optimized. That's why some Rust enthusiasts write that their Rust programs are "Blazingly Fast 🔥", instead of writing "very fast" like everyone else. Those same enthusiasts take the fact that, as I've said before, Rust avoids the memory management problems from some "fast" languages such as C, and advertise it as "Rust makes programs safer and remove entire classes of bugs while keeping it fast". None of these "ads" are wrong, but they can be a bit misleading to those who don't know much about programming.

First of all, a programmer can definitely make slow and buggy programs with Rust. Rust "fights" against bad memory management, but that's a small part of the issues that can rise from bad programming. Any programming language can try to "fight" bad programming practices (something that Rust tries to do), but there's always a limit to how much bad habits you can catch. Secondly, Rust isn't the only language that can offer fast, memory-safe programs. I've heard about benchmarks that showed that OCaml is one of the "fastest" programming languages, and it's a language that uses garbage collection. Many other examples exist. Heck, I've even heard of guidelines for fast memory-unsafe programming languages to avoid memory managent problems (here's an example https://misra.org.uk/).

I'm not saying this because I hate Rust, or anything. Rust is a really cool programming language that seems to be really useful for memory-constrained environments. However, just like any other programming language, it's a tool, not a magic wand. As such, please don't treat it like a miraculous solution to make your programs faster and less buggy. :::

You should instead look at how much care the developers put into their own programs. Now that's a good deciding point for whether to install a program.

Happy hacking! :)

(P.S.: please correct me if I wrote anything wrong)

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Unity bans VLC from Unity Store.

For anyone wondering:

  1. There was a plugin on Unity Store that acted a bridge between Unity and libVLC, which allowed developers to make video players inside the game engine. As the post says, it got removed.
  2. This plugin isn't made by VideoLAN, it's made by a company named Videolabs that includes several people who supposedly have contributed a lot on VLC and FFMPEG.
  3. The Videolan team made a blog post about this, if you want to know more: https://mfkl.github.io/2024/01/10/unity-double-oss-standards.html
linux

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GIMP - Development Update: Closing In on the 3.0 Release Candidate

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From the update:

One area we want to focus on after 3.0 is improving our UI/UX design process. We have set up a separate UX repository to report and discuss issues related to design. We are looking to build a team of designers to discuss and create design improvements to GIMP that also respect existing user’s workflows. Denis Rangelov has taken a strong interest in this area and has already done great work in identifying, categorizing, and moving design issues from the code repository to the dedicated design section. Some design improvements have already been implemented for 3.0, and we look forward to working with community designers to give people a better experience!

It'll take some time, but it seems like improvments may be coming.