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A comment on Go bindings to Rust's regex engine. Parent comment

Re:Go bindings to Rust's regex engine by pjmlp on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @03:06AM (#11618529)
I guess money, if you look at the history of computers the majority of interesting stuff failed because it didn't managed to pay for the investments that were done.

C and UNIX got widely adopted, because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it, so they gave the source code for free to universities. Which then used the code to replace the expensive OSes that they were running on their mainframes.

When AT&T was allowed to charge for it afterwards, they tried to make people pay for it, but failed to do so.

Also around this time UNIX vendors started selling the developer tools separately instead of having them for free. This motivated many to contribute to GNU, which was largely ignored up to that point.

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Re:Go bindings to Rust's regex engine by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @11:11AM (#11621330)
Sending you this link as you might have missed what actually happened on Burroughs end. I thought they petered out and got bought by Unisys. I didn't realize they were Unisys plus were selling billions in MCP systems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11621318

So, it wasn't the money for once.

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Re:Go bindings to Rust's regex engine by pjmlp on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @11:52AM (#11621720)
Thanks, I discovered that recently when reading about NEWP.

Have their programmers manual on my reading list.

But got the idea it is a very niche market, even smaller than IBM mainframes.

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Re:Go bindings to Rust's regex engine by nickpsecurity on Tuesday May 03, 2016 @11:54AM (#11621734)
That's probably true. Most material on the mainframe market says IBM has around 90% of it. Their revenues tend to suggest that, too. Probably the common effect with the First Mover advantage. I'm sure IBM bribing government officials in exchange for contracts helped, too. Let's not forget that angle. The NSA business alone would've been enough to found several, computer companies. ;)
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