"apparently" you base your assessment about curl's code being better on what? curl is no better and no worse than other unremarkable C code of the later '90s and early 2000s. It has had its share of serious vulnerabilities through the years.

And Firefox (which is not really a free software project) is itself deeply invested in "AI" shit hype, and so it's trying to push as much "AI" as possible, whether it makes sense or not, since that's their corporate boondogle now.

tl;dr; this will only lead to further dumbing down the source code: people will try to make their code dumber, and spike it with useless cargo-cult garbage, just to shy the AI bots away. It's like all those stupid contortions people do in order to shut down gcc warnings and pass -Wall -Werror, but many orders of magnitude worse.

Have you used "AI" for this "answer"? Are you a human or a fucking bot? Because there's absolutely nothing like that on page 13 of that pdf.

You're like those abject google ai answers which, when asked to locate a building from a picture, confidently place it at the crossing of two streets which either don't exist or don't intersect at all.

This is the first sentence on page 13:

The part of the C syntax I disliked most was the the declaration syntax. Having
both prefix and postfix declarator operators cause a fair amount of confusion. So does allowing
the type specifier to be left out (meaning int by default).

Or if you want the start of the 2.4.6 section from the same page:

The derived class concept is C++’s version of Simula’s prefixed class notion and thus a sibling of
Smalltalk’s subclass concept. [... goes on ranting about terminology, nothing even remotely related to multiple inheritance ...]

It's completely absurd to believe that the C++ haters from those days were so stupid and incompetent as to seriously believe that implementing multiple inheritance was "impossible" in C++. They were themselves competent programmers, their beef with C++ was more of the conceptual kind -- in fact, some notorious C++ haters later implemented something quite similar in the plan9 dialect of plain C with the ability to combine multiple structures, like this:

struct foo { int a, b; };
struct bar { int c, d; };
struct baz { struct foo; struct bar; int e; }; ...
baz q; ...
q.a = ...

Multi-inheritance is even uglier. You know why Bjarne Stroustrup added that to C++? Basically because somebody else said that it can't be done in C++, and he wanted to prove them wrong.

Do you have any evidence for that claim? Or have you just pulled that retarded story out of your ass?

They can't be bothered to fix (or even acknoledge!) serious bugs reported by humans, even those including patches

Who the fuck told you that? Mozilla's source code is still 98% C++ + javascript.

Only small parts of code were rewritten in rust (like the CSS parser).

The C++ code is mostly the same baroque, old-style C++ code from 25 years ago, but with a lot of ugly cruft and cargo-cult accumulated during failed refactorings and trial-and-error "fixing" performed by various ignorant imbeciles.

Remove the necessity for every service to write its own daemonization code;

That's a total non-issue. The entire "daemonization code" is just 2 syscalls: fork(2) + setsid(2) and using syslog(3) instead of stderr for printing error messages.

Other stuff like redirecting stdin/out/err to /dev/null or chdir / is usually more trouble than it's worth (for instance, I'm always redirecting the std fds from a non-connected socket instead of /dev/null -- in order to have accidental read/write FAIL instead of silently succeeding and hiding real issues with the code).

Adapting to the canned "solutions" offered by systemd / daemontools / whatever is instead much more complicated and more limiting in what you can do. All that without any benefit (besides better fitting into someone else's worldview and OCD fixations).

There are many things that aren't supported by ifconfig/iwconfig besides different routing tables (first which comes to mind is adding multiple addresses to the same interface).

It all comes down to how they communicate with the kernel -- ifconfig is using ioctls on a socket file descriptor, while ip & co are using netlink sockets. The ioctl interface is quite limited, and was not extended as new features were added to the kernel.

They could've adapted the old net-tools to use netlink behind the scenes while keeping the same command line tools with the same syntax (and I remember a guy who did just that -- but they have instead chosen to push that loose, verbose, ambiguous and non unix-like command line interface, supposedly made to resemble that from cisco or other "professional" equipment.

That propensity of imitating inferior, proprietary user interfaces has always been the bane of free software development: iirc, systemd itself appeared for no other reason than the urge to slavishly imitate launchd or whatever crap apple was pushing forth.

> Rather like the Romans could have had an Industrial Revolution a thousand years early if they didn't have masses of cheap slaves to do the work.

And the Romans could have also had locomotives and airplanes if they didn't have such a cheap and plentiful supply of horses. Given the right conditions, the right technology just pops into existence, out of nowhere.

I guess that kind of retarded shit is what counts as argument in magaland?

And one can wonder for how long they maintain an opt-in switch before removing it completely.

Probably not for long; the code which implements the primary selection handling on X11 in mozilla is BADLY broken, and they don't have anybody with the slightest clue about that stuff in their whole team, nor do they care to accept help from outside. And of course, they basically don't give a fuck about Linux / X11 (despite Linux users probably being about 40-50% of their REAL -- non-bot, non-website testers -- users left nowadays)

So at the first hitch they will rip it off completely.

Even from before it was called Firefox, Mozilla has been a bloated, misdesigned, user-hostile disaster.

Mozilla has never been able to work properly on X11 without a window manager, and more precisely a reparenting, click-to-focus one. Any focus-follows-mouse wm (or any innovative UI) had to implement ugly kludges and special cases just for being able to click links, open menus or enter data into forms.

Mozilla has never implemented the selection protocol protocol properly, whether for the clipboard (the one that is pasted with Ctrl-V), the primary selection (the one pasted with the middle-click) or more complex stuff, like dragging-and-dropping. Mozilla had always assumed that it could fetch the same selection multiple times, making impossible to implement e.g. something like "... | xsel -write" without buffering first the entire data.

Any program or library had to do that stuff in the same non-standard, degraded manner just to be able to interoperate with mozilla (and other similar crap, like java or openoffice).

I don't think that anybody at mozilla has ever bothered in the last 20 or 30 years to spend the 20 minutes needed to read the spec and understand how that stuff works: they simply assume that the clipboard is some kind of buffer, and if doesn't work like one it has to be "broken". Their ignorance and incompetence has also led to gaping security holes, like any visited site being able to write to the primary selection via javascript without any user interaction.

It's no wonder that the stupid, arrogant cocksuckers can't fix their garbage, so all they can do is go on and remove features, because supposedly "nobody" is using them.

Rob Pike was the guy behind the Mark V. Shaney bot, who was spamming the usenet with nonsense, statistically/randomly generated crap. You only reap what you sow.

If you find this remark idiotic or mean spirited, remember that Ku Klux Klan also started as a practical joke by quality people on other quality people. Thence their bizarre costumes and shit.

Very fat sarcasm aside, Android is not Linux (aside from a forked, heavily patched, frozen version of the Linux kernel),

Android is (below that stupid UI) very much linux underneath, as any dev who has spent time hacking various android devices can tell you. (and not some social media/stackexchange opinion bot recycling safe pieces of "common wisdom" for likes).

Android is using the same "linux" technologies as any typical desktop, server or embedded implementation of linux (selinux, namespaces, dm-verity, etc).

One inovative feature of Android is that each "app" is running as a separate user, but that simply builds same OS interfaces, just using them in a smarter and unexpected way, as its entire UI shim does. It would be pretty much impossible to "port" Android to another OS than Linux, even some modern Unix OS like MacOS or FreeBSD.

Linux (distros) have always been crap and will continue to be crap for the average Joe

Russian trolls would better leave the average "Joes" alone and go mind their own business

That extension basically lets you to extend C structs like in C++, but allows you to add new members *both* at the start and at the end of the base struct:

struct foo {
    int m;
};
struct bar {
    int before;
    struct foo;
    int after;
};
int main() {
    struct bar b; b.m = 33;
}

Torvalds himself isn't quite as grumpy as people think

Or maybe he has more clue about those "microsoft extensions" actually do.

The actual feature enabled by the "-fms-extensions" option in gcc is anonymous member structs and unions, which had first appeared in plan9 and was invented by the same people who created the C language in the first place.