Many organizations and environments will not switch themselves to LLVM to hamfist compiled Rust code. Nor is the fact of LLVM supporting something in principle means that it's installed on the relevant OS distribution.
Using LLVM somewhere in the build doesn't require that you compile everything with LLVM. It generates object files, just like GCC, and you can link together object files compiled with each compiler, as long as they don't use compiler-specific runtime libraries (like the C++ standard library, or a polyfill compiler-rt library).
If you're developing, you generally have control over the development environment (+/-) and you can install things. Plus that already reduces the audience: set of people with oddball hardware (as someone here put it) intersected with the set of people with locked down development environments.
Let alone the fact that conceptually people with locked down environments are precisely those would really want the extra safety offered by Rust.
I know that real life is messy but if we don't keep pressing, nothing improves.
> If you're developing, you generally have control over the development environment
If you're developing something individually, then sure, you have a lot of control. When you're developing as part of an organization or a company, you typically don't. And if there's non-COTS hardware involved, you are even more likely not to have control.
Well, now, they can handle it more seriously, which before - they couldn't quite. That's because Microsoft - your company - is one big security breach. You are known to pass information that gets into your hand to the US federal government's intelligence agency, and you probably use it for all sorts of commercial purposes, like training AI models, directing advertising etc. So, by installing Microsoft Office, especially Office365 and cloud facilities, they were ensuring a security failure.
"Poland provoked occupation by Germany" (1939)? Germany "liberated Czechoslovakia Germans" by occupation and annexation (1938)? How occupation and annexation of neighbors ended for WW2 Germany (1938-1945)?
In 2014 Moscow invaded Ukraine, occupied Crimea, Donetsk, Luhanks. In 2022 Moscow invaded again. No NATO forces in Ukraine. No Moscow forces on NATO members territory. Trump officials unable to answer who started war, you blame NATO, both you and Trump aligned with Moscow.
It is by now a trusty enough workhorse for large organizations.
Yes, it's not all the way there: I've filed hundreds of bugs against LibreOffice, and many are still open (not just feature requests); and yes, I have a lot of criticism of the governance. But it is proof that a huge, end-user-facing software project can sustain itself and improve within having to rely on the MS-bucks or the Googlebucks and such.
But a huge project needs a lot of support, and needs to renew its support from new people, so please help out!
Filing bugs, contributing graphics, translating parts of the UI (which you would be a saint to do since the translation system is the pits), designing document templates, organizing an install-party, getting promotional material and putting it, and of course you can write write code (starting with easy-hacks) or contribute money.
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Due disclosure: I'm a trustee of The Document Foundation, which manages the project. Going to speak at LOConf Asia 2025 in Tokyo later this month:
It supports devices just as long as the OEM does, which for modern Pixels is now 7 years, which is more than what Apple advertises for the iPhone. Considering people upgrade phones every 2 or 3 years, this is over double the amount of time of support than one would use the phone for. I disagree the support is for a short period of time.
An important motivation for a FOSS OS for phones is not having to buy a new phone just to have up-to-date software.
Also, "people" who buy a Google-Pixel-level phone every two years are likely among the richer... let's say 10% of the world's population? Probably even less. The rest - don't do that.
Reducing waste is very important, but I think this is something you need to take up with the Android OEMs. GrapheneOS can't really do anything about the fact that Android OEMs stop supporting the device and allow vulnerabilities to go unaddressed. For context in this situation, GrapheneOS is also trying to provide a best-in-class privacy/security experience for people. There were other projects that are/were dedicated to supporting abandoned hardware.
A connected world full of devices with excessively vulnerable hardware & software is also something GrapheneOS are desperate to avoid.
I don't think that is a consideration for the project. Their OEM partnership also includes supporting a current generation Snapdragon SoC which seems to feature an integrated modem.
>A component being on a separate chip is orthogonal to whether it's isolated. In order to be isolated, the drivers need to treat it as untrusted. If it has DMA access, that needs to be contained via IOMMU and the driver needs to treat the shared memory as untrusted, as it would do with data received another way.
I actually like short travel very light linear switches, mechanical or not.
I don’t like row stagger and non-split keyboards, for ergonomic reasons. That’s definitely a niche preference, but if anyone would cater to it you’d expect it to be Framework or similar.
You're right that Framework is exactly where I would expect flexibility on this: I mean, just looking at their landing page - you see a laptop without the keyboard and ports. Framework offers 176 (!) kinds of "keyboards":
(Answer: it's basically just keyboard covers, and the many options are due to variations of colors and languages. But I would take a hot pink / toxic green keyboard with ancient tibetan labels if the keys were non-chicklet, with decent travel, sizes, and feedback. 7 rows if possible.)
Overhead of small volume manufacturing. If they make all those variations and intend to continue existing as a company that makes money selling things, it would have to be at a price where no one's going to buy one. But if I start an Etsy store selling one-offs at $399 each, people can grumble about my price, but it's not on Framework.
so, if you were thinking "who would use a 3D-printed part", remember that it may otherwise also have been made with some liquid material, but using a mold, and perhaps two parts using a mold that are joined with re-heating etc. - and now it no longer sounds so outlandish.
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