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> Open source is all about collaboration and this code redundancy is a historic accident. I totally, 100% disagree. Software monocultures are extremely harmful

by OskarS 6y ago

> Open source is all about collaboration and this code redundancy is a historic accident. I totally, 100% disagree. Software monocultures are extremely harmful: implementation bugs get baked in as standard features, innovation stagnate without competition and single providers get oversized power. The best case-study here is when Internet Explorer was dominant: you think that was good for the web? Software is like everything else: diversity and having a large "gene pool" is incredibly healthy. > Would rust or go benefit from totally redundant implementations? Of course they would, that would be awesome! Look at Python, it's been very good for the language to have a large variety of backends (Jython, PyPy, IronPython, etc.) in addition to the standard distribution. Of course none of them are as popular, but the fact that they exist is a sign of a healthy language.

oorza 6y ago
I wouldn't even pick Python, but the JVM, where there are multiple very successful options and several businesses built on top of "totally redundant implementations."
- The_rationalist 6y ago
  Wtf? The standard implementation has won (openjdk) and any other implementation is only historic baggage or a niche. All human effort that has gone in openj9 has been wasted
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    J9 is used a lot with IBM customers (banks + other finance on WebSphere aka Websfear). I'm not going to defend Java here, but Java/JVM might very well be the last flagship of a huge language + API + testsuite with multiple interworking implementations. If you don't like that, then there will be only proprietary single-vendor languages going forward.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    There are like 10 major JVMs around between commercial, open source and research variants.
- OskarS 6y ago
  Yes, for sure, that's an even better example. GraalVM is a good recent thing showing the strength of many implementations.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Actually GraalVM isn't that recent, its history goes back to MaximeVM, initially released in 2005, so GraalVM has 15 years of research work put into it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxine_Virtual_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxine_Virtual_Machine

by OskarS 6y ago

oorza 6y ago

I wouldn't even pick Python, but the JVM, where there are multiple very successful options and several businesses built on top of "totally redundant implementations."

The_rationalist 6y ago
Wtf? The standard implementation has won (openjdk) and any other implementation is only historic baggage or a niche. All human effort that has gone in openj9 has been wasted
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  J9 is used a lot with IBM customers (banks + other finance on WebSphere aka Websfear). I'm not going to defend Java here, but Java/JVM might very well be the last flagship of a huge language + API + testsuite with multiple interworking implementations. If you don't like that, then there will be only proprietary single-vendor languages going forward.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  There are like 10 major JVMs around between commercial, open source and research variants.
OskarS 6y ago
Yes, for sure, that's an even better example. GraalVM is a good recent thing showing the strength of many implementations.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Actually GraalVM isn't that recent, its history goes back to MaximeVM, initially released in 2005, so GraalVM has 15 years of research work put into it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxine_Virtual_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxine_Virtual_Machine