Wow, and I consider steam to be utter trash. It uses more resources than the games I want to play. A web browsing engine, in the software that’s the only way to launch the game you paid for, just to show bargain bin shit. But I’m not interested in that, I just want to have a place to shop, and then the ability to use the things I bought. I don’t want to drive to Walmart to play the music I bought, I don’t want my computer to load Walmart just so I can play a game. It’s crazy how bad Steam has become.

I wonder how many sites will bother checking for Spanish pornpasses. Seems they’re just playing people and waiting for the inevitable, “Turns out the Internet isn’t respecting our kids, we need to ratchet up the control. We tried to give you a good deal though, right?”

It’s new to me, I think it’s saying that your system is built up by you declaring what you want in a file, a single source that everything comes from.

It’s atomic because each action the system takes is carefully completed rather than bailing out and requiring you to fix something.

It’s immutable meaning you declare how you want things to be set up and then critical changes stem from those declarations and nothing else. You would obviously generate preferences, save data, etc. but the files that make the system / packages work are carefully locked.

It’s like the concept of flatpaks + structured system defining + modern common sense OS operations?

No problem. I’m no guru and I’m currently on Zig but I think learning some Rust is a really fast way to hone skills that are implied by other languages.

You use lifetimes to annotate parameters and return values in order to tell the compiler about how long things must last for your function to be valid. You can link a specific input with the output, or explicitly separate them. If you don’t give lifetimes the language uses some basic rules to do it for you. If it can’t, eg it’s ambiguous, then it’s a compile error and you need to do it manually.

It’s one of the harder concepts of rust to explain succinctly. But imagine you had a function that took strA and strB, used strB to find a subsection of strA, and then return a slice of strA. That slice is tied to strA. You would use 'a annotation for strA and the return value, and 'b for strB.

Rust compiler will detect the lifetime being shorter than expected.

Also, ownership semantics. Think c++ move semantics. Only one person is left with a good value, the previous owners just have garbage data they can’t use anymore. If you created a thing on the heap and then gave it away, you wouldn’t have it anymore to free at the end. If you want to have “multiple owners” then you need ref counting and such, which also stops this problem of premature freeing.

Edit: one more thing: reference rules. You can have many read-only references to a thing, or one mutable reference. Unless you’re doing crazy things, the compiler simply won’t let you have references to a thing, and then via one of those references free that thing, thereby invalidating the other references.

I don’t see a negative. It’s foss so you ought to be relaxed about others using your code. The issues are probably just articulating problems that were already there. If it’s stuff you don’t care about… it’s a foss repository so you just ignore it.

Burning CDs. That’s how I know most people didn’t know how to do it, or want to put in the effort. You had to go buy a stack of CDs, hope your computer supported burning, had to make sure players could support the burned disc (depending on if you made a music disc or data disc, if it was rewritable), and spend the time to burn the disc.

Contrast that to ctrl+c ctrl+v.

There’s more people who can ‘duplicate’ digital files than there were people burning CDs.

The amount of people who will duplicate their tapes and CDs would be lower than the amount of people who will duplicate their digital files.

Most of the time when a law sounds silly for banning something when alternatives exist, it’s because people themselves are silly and don’t actually go for the alternatives at the same rate as they would the banned thing. Ie gun accessory bans, ninja star bans.