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Very interesting comments and moderation discussion on this article.

Decent article, why the need for someone to pick up the pitchfork and emphasize their moral compass publicly like this? The comment and ensuing discussion is so pointless.

Why do we pretend that these things don’t matter? Why should we?

Why in the norm to ignore these issues - there by perpetuating them because they face no consequences - rather than pointing them out?

Justine did write openly on the web about their prejudices and never even apologized let alone showed in anyway evolution away from fascist leaning and prejudiced politics

I didn't know about Justine's politics and I'm glad I do now. She is definitely not someone I would want to be associated with, unless she clearly distanced herself from these - in my opinion - deeply problematic and disturbing views.

EDIT: That being said, I think it should still be possible to discuss her technical contributions in some form. It's basically the old question as to which extend you can separate the work from the author.

It preserves HN and LWN as useful forums for purely technical discussions with high signal/noise, basically. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html :

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity.

I think I am missing a lot of context in this thread - I have no idea what any of the ancestral comments are talking about :-(

Its in regards to the discussions taking place in this thread: https://lwn.net/Articles/998196/

I fail to see anything of substance here, seems to be some person with a chip on their shoulder. Apparently the word cosmopolitan is a derogatory dog whistle for Jewish person, but why would an antisemite name their own work after something they do not like?

Just to be clear I'm not talking about Justine here and I consider the project to be well within the normal meaning of "cosmopolitan", but dogwhistle names are absolutely a thing antisemites do.

I did the same for a different political issue once, I just thought it was funny

Please tell me how it matters.

What are you arguing here? Should no one use APE? Should people use APE but just feel bad every time they do? Should people use APE but never write about it for fear of aggrandizing the author?

I think this point was valid: "she doesn't "stick to the technology""

The tech is cool. But the person who made it kicks puppies. You don't care? Well I do.

Why?

This makes sense in the case of, for example, a bestselling author who kicks puppies. Purchasing books by this author means you are giving them money, if indirectly, and thus to some degree subsidizing their puppy kicking habit.

That I can determine using APE gives the original author nothing.

Werner von Braun comes to mind.

Wait, Werner von Braun kicked puppies?

SS-Sturmbannführer von Braun, at best, looked away from the labor situation at the Mittelwerk complex that was building his rockets.

Yeah, sorry, I know that particular fascist’s history, but apparently sarcasm doesn’t drip as heavily on the Internet as I thought.

Poe's law strikes again!

Say a fan of ReiserFS, without 'knowledge or opinion of Hans' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115276

In general, I've noticed that people like to kick the people with least power or privilege, which often means women are targeted as they tend to have the least power and privilege.

Oh, a BigTech company is evil, with CO2 demands that will kill the planet, support for genocide, and developing mass surveillance to improve their bottom line? Not a problem! Look at all the cool tech toys they have!

Someone develops cool tech toys but has horrible personal opinions? Keep him around as the Chief GNUissance and invite him to all the conferences because he didn't do anything except express opinions, but pounce on her whenever people mention her toys, because of her opinions.

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I have learned there is no true portability. Example: named pipes:

I started my professional career as a C++/Qt developer. There was this code to disallow multiple application instances using named pipes. It used named pipes under both Linux and Windows - just create a named pipe "my-program-pipe" and it was a signal for other starting up instances to communicate to it "please put the main app on top" and close.

On linux it worked like a charm. On Windows it worked like a charm...

...only first time. The code was written to "try create a named pipe and if failed - then it means it exists, so write to it instead and exit". This "try create" operation on windows failed but also removed the original existing pipe, thus allowing the third instance to coexist with the first one.

What I mean - Operating Systems are more than this, you cannot write a truly portable application without knowing them all. And especially those quirks that differ...

Hence the Cosmopolitan Libc layer that's kinda essential to the APEs described in the article. That's where all the magic is to make the same code work on a variety of operating systems.

There's even a handy table to express syscall compatibility across all of Cosmopolitan's targets - https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/functions.html

You could always just write your own OS that only cares about running your app. Of course you are always going to run into problems if your program uses functions that you didn't design around. I think any Linux user could tell you that Windows programs don't run on Linux, so I don't know how you could have thought that there was some sort of portability guarantee between these two operating systems or even subsets of them.

If this is some OOP propaganda then I'm sorry but you got duped and the c++/qt community should act more professionally.

portability in a language is sort of like the right to persue happiness vs a garantee to be happy.

A language can't direct the rest of the universe to ensure that something always works regardless of the environment or context.

But it can avoid adding it's own limitations and be agnostic itself. So c is very portable, even though c on machine A has acces to machine A features and not machine B features.

Libraries and frameworks and standards just help a little for a few common cases but they are just travel power plug adapters, not pprtability.

Your general point stands, of course. One can only code against a tiny subset of features. Windows has now finally gotten "real" named pipes, though. (Since Windows 8 or whenever, can't remember exactly when.)

So am I getting this right? Cosmopolitian allows me to compile my code once, and run the same binary on every machine it supports? Is this a dream?

As I understand, you have to compile your code for every machine you support, then it combines them into a single executable.

Yes, and yes:) It is exactly as amazing as it sounds. I'm still blown away that that includes both x86 and ARM.