Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton, Mesa, and More

Re:Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton,... by bombolo on Saturday December 17, 2022 @05:23PM (#34032918)

But the called functions need to be loaded in memory for every process using them, instead of once.

Also there is value in being able to fix a library without having to recompile everything.

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Re:Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton,... by craftkiller on Saturday December 17, 2022 @06:10PM (#34033256)

Everything is getting recompiled all the time anyway. At least with FreeBSD, any time a dependency is updated, all the packages that depend on that package get rebuilt. There's no concept of "this was a small update and its dynamically linked", its just "the version string changed, so rebuild everything that lists it as a dependency". This is particularly "fun" for web browsers because they have a lot of dependencies, ensuring they're rebuilt often, and they take a long time to build.

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Re:Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton,... by bombolo on Saturday December 17, 2022 @06:39PM (#34033429)

> Everything is getting recompiled all the time anyway.

Source? I know when stuff on my distribution gets recompiled because then I have to download and unpack it, so I notice.

I can assure you that it isn't as you say.

> with FreeBSD

Despite the monorepo thing, I assure you that most FreeBSD users do use software coming from other places as well.

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Re:Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton,... by CamperBob2 on Saturday December 17, 2022 @06:46PM (#34033474)

If nothing else, you probably see several megabytes' worth of JIT compilation whenever you visit a JavaScript-heavy web page. Same effect... namely, none at all.

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Re:Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton,... by bombolo on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:25AM (#34035701)

Lol sure… JIT only does the hot paths, not the whole thing. It certainly will not make several mb of output without my computer sounding like an ariane5 launch

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Re:Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton,... by CamperBob2 on Saturday December 17, 2022 @06:48PM (#34033494)

Also there is value in being able to fix a library without having to recompile everything.

Number of times I have benefited from this process: 0 (AFAIK)

Number of times this process has hosed previously-working applications and components: too many to count

On Windows, this "feature" was called "DLL Hell," and was generally considered a bad thing. Nothing has fundamentally changed since it was a common practice for every installer to have its way with c:\windows, IMHO. (Admittedly shared MSVC runtimes aren't as big a problem as the Winsock-provider-du-jour was, but still... there is simply no point.)

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Re:Valve Is Paying Open-Source Developers to Work on Proton,... by bombolo on Sunday December 18, 2022 @02:26AM (#34035702)

> Number of times I have benefited from this process: 0 (AFAIK)

Every day on my distribution, when I have to download 5kb of library instead of 3GB of everything recompiled…

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