this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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KDE

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KDE is an international technology team creating user-friendly free and open source software for desktop and portable computing. KDE’s software runs on GNU/Linux, BSD and other operating systems, including Windows.

Plasma 6 Bugs

If you encounter a bug, proceed to https://bugs.kde.org, check whether it has been reported.

If it hasn't, report it yourself.

PLEASE THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE POSTING HERE.

Developers do not look for reports on social media, so they will not see it and all it does is clutter up the feed.

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[–] YaBoyMax 22 points 10 months ago (3 children)

I'm all for some good old Rust evangelism, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to claim that KDE is "doomed"in the absence of a migration path to Rust, and it's not obvious to me that moving to Rust is somehow a necessity for the long-term viability of a project.

To your point about young devs and C/C++, afaik C is still pretty standard curriculum for CS degrees at most colleges and universities. C++ maybe not so much, but I would argue that it actually has a shallower learning curve than Rust. IMO the STL is a lot easier to get a grasp on as a newer developer than Rust's borrow checker or lifetime system.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago

IMO the STL is a lot easier to get a grasp on as a newer developer than Rust's borrow checker or lifetime system.

I actually feel like Rust's borrow checker is more difficult to learn for experienced devs. We've got a trainee in Rust and for her, it's just a normal thing that variable slots hold ownership and can lend it and get it back. She does sometimes still struggle with when to clone and when to borrow, but she's getting there.

As for the lifetime system, no one on our team really gets that one. 🙃
But (that's because) you rarely need it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

@YaBoyMax @Pantherina I do think that KDE is doomed if it stays with C++ long term. The tooling is just horrible, you spend so much time debugging things. In my experience young people just do not put up with all that! It's just us old people doing what we always did.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

@YaBoyMax @Pantherina this assumes that a C++ dev gets by without managing lifetimes. That is just not true: Mismanaging lifetimes is a bug in all languages.

The difference is the rust compiler detects those issues and errors out, so you have to fix the issue right away. In C++ the compiler will just accept the code, so you can deal with the issue later once bug reports come in.