4 ms·

Do you enjoy perl constructed header files? VMS support? Inconsistent error codes across APIs? Then OpenSSL is for you. None of the problems have been fixed.

by wbl 5y ago

ncann 5y ago
Reminds me of this classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20201224212934/https://www.peereboom.us/assl/assl/html/openssl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201224212934/https://www.peere...
seneca 5y ago
Did they reject the PRs you sent implementing those updates?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
skissane 5y ago
> VMS support? Is it a bad thing to support OpenVMS, given it is still an actively maintained operating system? It isn't used anywhere near as much as it used to be, but it is still used. It has even been ported to x86-64.
- saurik 5y ago
  Some people (absolutely not me: I refuse to even work with such people) believe that supporting anything other than their computer is not just a waste of resources, but a bug.
  - chasil 5y ago
    I actually have an account on a VAX VMS 7.3 system. I have an openssl binary there that I found. It is not linked against Multinet TCP, so none of the network functions work. It is occasionally handy, even given the library problem.
stusmall 5y ago
I remember stumbling into that perl codegen years ago and just being horrified. I haven't done any OpenSSL internal work in years and recently I tried to find it and couldn't. I thought maybe it was just a vivid nightmare.
- saurik 5y ago
  In what way was using Perl horrifying? Is it that they weren't using whatever flavor-of-the-week stylish language everyone now thinks is "cool", like some ridiculous node.js stack in Typescript? If they were using Python--which FWIW is extremely common in the build script space--would you have been any less "horrified"? :/
  - ajsnigrutin 5y ago
    Considering the age of openssl, using perl was a smart choice... Everything else would have been rewritten atleast three times by now... even porting from python 2.x->3.x takes a lot of effort... ...and perl? Just works!
    - _hyn3 5y ago
      > even porting from python 2.x->3.x takes a lot of effort... > ...and perl? Just works! Agreed! And, if anything, you might be understating it. We went through a Python 2 -> 3 migration recently and it required a massive effort across the entire company; ultimately, we decided to shelve it and port most of our code to Go; this effort has been ongoing to this day. This choice to not offer backwards compatibility left a very, very bad taste in our mouths, and we'll probably never go back to Python. It's astonishing that the PSF just decided that probably trillions of lines of working, production-quality code at companies around the world would need to be re-written. Perhaps it's "their" code, so it's their prerogative, but Go's backwards-compatibility pledge was a huge factor in our decision to move toward it. For those of us on the team who are old enough (honestly) to know Perl (as much as anyone can?), well, there are still some very large companies that have massive Perl codebases and they seem to be happy with them.

Do you enjoy perl constructed header files? VMS support? Inconsistent error codes across APIs? Then OpenSSL is for you. None of the problems have been fixed.

by wbl 5y ago

Do you enjoy perl constructed header files? VMS support? Inconsistent error codes across APIs? Then OpenSSL is for you. None of the problems have been fixed.

ncann 5y ago

Reminds me of this classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20201224212934/https://www.peereboom.us/assl/assl/html/openssl.html https://web.archive.org/web/20201224212934/https://www.peere...

seneca 5y ago

Did they reject the PRs you sent implementing those updates?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

skissane 5y ago

> VMS support? Is it a bad thing to support OpenVMS, given it is still an actively maintained operating system? It isn't used anywhere near as much as it used to be, but it is still used. It has even been ported to x86-64.

saurik 5y ago
Some people (absolutely not me: I refuse to even work with such people) believe that supporting anything other than their computer is not just a waste of resources, but a bug.
- chasil 5y ago
  I actually have an account on a VAX VMS 7.3 system. I have an openssl binary there that I found. It is not linked against Multinet TCP, so none of the network functions work. It is occasionally handy, even given the library problem.

stusmall 5y ago

I remember stumbling into that perl codegen years ago and just being horrified. I haven't done any OpenSSL internal work in years and recently I tried to find it and couldn't. I thought maybe it was just a vivid nightmare.

saurik 5y ago
In what way was using Perl horrifying? Is it that they weren't using whatever flavor-of-the-week stylish language everyone now thinks is "cool", like some ridiculous node.js stack in Typescript? If they were using Python--which FWIW is extremely common in the build script space--would you have been any less "horrified"? :/
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Considering the age of openssl, using perl was a smart choice... Everything else would have been rewritten atleast three times by now... even porting from python 2.x->3.x takes a lot of effort... ...and perl? Just works!
  - _hyn3 5y ago
    > even porting from python 2.x->3.x takes a lot of effort... > ...and perl? Just works! Agreed! And, if anything, you might be understating it. We went through a Python 2 -> 3 migration recently and it required a massive effort across the entire company; ultimately, we decided to shelve it and port most of our code to Go; this effort has been ongoing to this day. This choice to not offer backwards compatibility left a very, very bad taste in our mouths, and we'll probably never go back to Python. It's astonishing that the PSF just decided that probably trillions of lines of working, production-quality code at companies around the world would need to be re-written. Perhaps it's "their" code, so it's their prerogative, but Go's backwards-compatibility pledge was a huge factor in our decision to move toward it. For those of us on the team who are old enough (honestly) to know Perl (as much as anyone can?), well, there are still some very large companies that have massive Perl codebases and they seem to be happy with them.