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Sponsorship needed for new OS/2 web browser (2017)
- mhd 8y agoSo what makes Rust impossible to port to OS/2?
- ofrzeta 8y agoThey said "unlikely" not "impossible". I guess it is unlikely because no one is willing to put in the massive resources needed to port Rust to an archaic platform. Here's a link about porting the Rust compiler to the Haiku OS: http://rust-on-haiku.com/wiki/PortingRust http://rust-on-haiku.com/wiki/PortingRust Please note that Haiku is among the supported OSs of the LLVM compiler framework while OS/2 isn't. So unless you want to re-create a Rust compiler from scratch you would first need to port LLVM to OS/2.
- mkj 8y agomrustc might be an option to avoid LLVM.
- mhd 8y agoYeah, the backend not being available is certainly a showstopper, thanks. GCC being ported to every silicon-based system under the sun does blind one to the fact that that isn't necessarily true for its rivals.
- _verandaguy 8y agoIt probably helps that GCC was around when OS/2 and other now-archaic systems were relevant.
- Arnt 8y agoWriting an OS/2 backend for a language that uses LLVM isn't impossible, but it's hard, hard work. Writing or porting a linker, implementing the low-level parts of the Rust runtime. Fixing bugs likely requires being fluent in all of Rust, C++, LLVM IR and OS/2's variant of x86 assembly, and tracing causes from the Rust frontend through a dozen layers and subsystems until their effect show up in x86. You may think I'm exaggerating.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- golergka 8y agoI don't think that you're exaggerating, but writing a browser is also a lot of very hard work. And writing a browser is only writing a single application; implementing a LLVM backend, however, is supporting thousands of potential applications. Wouldn't it make much sense to raise funds towards this goal? Also, browser is one of the main attack surfaces in modern web, and writing your own browser instead of sticking with a huge project that benifits from researchers all around the globe just doesn't sound right. Especially since OS/2 has a lot of legacy use in corporations that can be targetted for an attack.
- exikyut 8y ago> thousands of potential applications. > ...OS/2 ...probably not. Wouldn't mind if that weren't the case, but that's fundamentally a legal problem IMO (impossible to open source etc).
- closeparen 8y agoOK, I understand why someone might need to maintain and deploy an OS/2 app deep within some enterprise backend, but why on earth is anyone trying to browse the web with it?
- JdeBP 8y agoBecause the likes of eComStation and ArcaOS have consumer-level tools. Both come in business/commercial and home/personal flavours. * http://ecomstation.com/ http://ecomstation.com/ * https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-now-available/ https://www.arcanoae.com/arcaos-5-0-now-available/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359630)
- danieldk 8y agoPut differently, why would anyone in their right mind use OS/2 to browse the web, given that it misses more than two decades in development of security techniques. As far as I understand Mensys and now Arca Noae never had the source code to the OS/2 kernel or foundational libraries. Given that this code was written in the late eighties-half nineties in a largely pre-internet world: - It's likely that many of the libraries are full of buffer overflows, double frees, dangling pointers, etc. - OS/2 is not a multi-user system, there is no boundary between a user and a root-like account. - OS/2 does not have modern mitigation techniques like (K)ASLR, probably no PIE/PIC, stack canaries, etc. - OS/2 (AFAIR) does not offer sandboxing facilities, such as seccomp, capsicum, or pledge. - OS/2 has no protection against recent CPU vulnerabilities. So, if you are using OS/2 to browse the web, you are purely relying on security through obscurity.
- mattparlane 8y agoUpdate: http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/17-new-web-browser-for-os2-roadmap-update-4.html http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/17-new-web-brows... They've raised $12,650 and think it will take around 18 months.
- ricardobeat 8y agoNo mention of NetSurf? It’s a much simpler codebase that should be easy to port.
- classichasclass 8y agoI love NetSurf and I love that it even exists. It's fun browsing pages in a reasonable fashion on my '060 Amiga 4000T. However, NetSurf's DOM and JavaScript support is embryonic by comparison, and sites other than static pages generally don't work. It's slowly improving but it's nowhere near Gecko, WebKit or Blink.
- kalleboo 8y agoeComStation and ArcaOS are commercial software, shouldn't their developers be the ones paying for the effort to keep their clients' software cheaper to maintain on their legacy platforms than rewriting it to something better-supported?
- zerr 8y agoYup. I'd love to get paid for working on OS/2 apps.
- kjrose 8y agoSame here. Man. That would be some serious nostalgia.
- martiniturbide 8y agoYes and No. There are actually developers that had given a lot of open source software to the platform (OS/2) without expecting nothing in return. But cloning OS/2 to turn it open source is a very long task and we don't have enough hands on the community. But eComStation and ArcaOS uses IBM's binaries (OS/2 binaries), so to be a legal product an agreement and $$$ has to be given to IBM to be able to distribute a resell the binaries. So, it can not be a free product until some developers clone an open source replacement for the OS/2's binaries. If you have doubts you can visit OS2World.com and ask on the forum.
- JdeBP 8y agoThat's October 2017. There was a follow-on in November 2017 that answered some questions. * http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/12-update-on-the-voice-browser-funding-campaign.html http://articles.os2voice.org/category/voice/12-update-on-the... And further follow-ons as already mentioned in this discussion. * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17461751 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17461751
- JdeBP 8y agoInterestingly, the SPARC people with TenFourFox suffer for the same reasons. * http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/07/another-one-bites-rust.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/07/another-one-bites-rus...
- sanxiyn 8y agoRust has port to SPARC Linux and SPARC Solaris. The author is mistaken about that.
- classichasclass 8y agoAuthor (of the post you reference) here. On https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html https://forge.rust-lang.org/platform-support.html every single triple with SPARC in it lacks cargo, and only a single Tier-3 port has rustc (NetBSD). Solaris and Linux just have std. That's not a port, that's barely a beachhead. If you know this has changed, then the maintainers need to update that.
- sanxiyn 8y agoYup, this has changed. You can download sparc64 Debian package for Cargo right now here: https://packages.debian.org/sid/cargo https://packages.debian.org/sid/cargo I will send updates to the page. Thanks!
- mhd 8y agoThat's SPARC people and TenFourFox folks. The former just used regular Firefox with Solaris or Linux, the latter a backported Firefox for version of OS X that Apple abandoned (both PPC and Intel, IIRC).
- hsivonen 8y agoTenFourFox isn't SPARC but PowerPC. Rust runs on PowerPC but not on OS X on PowerPC. OS X earlier than 10.7 lacks at least some thread-local facilities that Rust expects.
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- JdeBP 8y agoFor those wondering what Warpstock 2018 Toronto had to do with it, that is apparently a mis-print in an article written in 2017. (-: Here is Warpstock 2017: * http://warpstock.org/staticpages/index.php?page=ws2017_sessions http://warpstock.org/staticpages/index.php?page=ws2017_sessi...
- stuaxo 8y agoLack of Rust on OS/2 is touted as a reason for not porting more modern Firefox, I wonder if anyone has had a go at porting Rust to OS / 2?
- Ygg2 8y agoNot so much lack of Rust, as lack of LLVM, that Rust needs to build.
- mhd 8y agoI wouldn't be surprised if by sheer code size and tools needed, a major browser is a more complicated me…, erm, project, than the OS+UI itself.
- DonHopkins 8y agoIf you really need OS/2 so bad, then why not just run OS/2 in the web browser sandbox on top of a modern operating system?
- flafla2 8y agoExactly—modern browsers are about as complicated as OS/2 anyway.
- lamarpye 8y agoSeems like if you ordered the things that needed funding, OS/2 would be near the bottom of the list. Maybe Gates could cough up something, just for the irony.