The results aren’t going to be that skewed. They operate on a simple principle. There are many features available on a modern web browser with a high degree of variability. Even not having a feature is itself a piece of a fingerprint. The combination of those many, many features is going to produce a high degree of uniqueness for almost any browser.
including some of Rust’s better ideas than to throw it away
The problem is that you can’t just tack Rust’s ideas onto an existing language. Generics, traits, lifetimes, borrowing, sum types, and match are key Rust features, but took considerable design time before Rust even reached 1.0. They interlock to produce a pleasant development experience. You can’t just attached them to C and call it a day.
I don’t think Rust is wholly bad, to be clear, but it seems over-engineered to me, and the fact its useful new features don’t even completely work (see rust-cve) isn’t very encouraging.
Most of the CVE’s listed there are in unsafe code in the standard library. At some point, some code is going to have to have to implement the tricky cases. In C, this code is common place, ready for any coder to run into problems. In Rust, these are bizarre edge cases that most people would never trigger.
I haven’t heard Jonathan Blow’s take yet, but one thing a person pointed out is that he tends to prefer a style that uses a lot of shared state. Rust explicitly discourages that style, considering it a source of bugs.
I encourage you to give Rust a try. It never hurts to have another language in your arsenal. Who knows, you might even find it fun.
I tried for a bit and it was great, no complaints. However, I was having issues getting NixOS set up as quickly as I would like, so I went back to Pop!_OS. I’m looking forward to the next release of Pop, which will have full Wayland by default.
I’m going to be honest, as long as the terminal does its job reasonably well and with good readability then I’m pretty much satisfied. It’s one of those tools that I want to just work well the first time. I’ve become a man of simple tastes in my (not so) old age.
Usually whatever fits in best with the DE I’m using. I’m on Pop!, so that’s Gnome Terminal currently. I’m excited to see when System76’s Pop!_OS’s COSMIC Desktop will bring with an alacritty-based terminal emulator.
Love me some fish! Though for more complex data processing, I’m working on learning nushell. Being able to work with more complex data structures is amazing.
I think their uses extend beyond obsolete software. In particular, trying to get updates out to a wide variety of Linux distros has generally meant a tradeoff between “move fast, break things” and “move slow, never change”. Flatpak gives you a stable set of libraries to work with and the ability to run multiple versions of those libraries at once. Linux package managers have a place, but their sheer proliferation means that for most applications to reach all desktop Linux users, they have to go through something like Flatpak for distribution.