rfleury

Give the ideology a rest. Nothing will change.

Nothing has changed about the project’s design, intentions, or goals in the 5 years since the acquisition. This is just ideological.

It was acquired before I even joined the company.

The repository was first open sourced 2 years after the acquisition. Nothing has changed about the project’s goals. We are working on the Linux port now. It’s currently our top priority.

Those interested can go look at all of the actual code I’ve written using these techniques, and decide for themselves whether or not it’s practical only for “simple sub tasks or basic CLI tools”:

https://github.com/EpicGamesExt/raddebugger/blob/c738768e411...

https://github.com/EpicGamesExt/raddebugger/blob/master/src/...

Are you out of your mind? LLMs will require much more debugging, not less.

Separately, I have no idea which “senior developers” you know, but with or without LLMs, debugging is an immensely important part of development across the industry.

There are certainly issues (it’s in alpha after all—this was meant to be more of a soft launch, but it then kind of blew up), but I don’t think anything you listed would qualify as “jank”, and rather your unfamiliarity with the system or non-standard/idiosyncratic designs? That doesn’t apply to the “underline to hint @ shortcut” point, which has been a standard Windows UI principle since, well, before I was born…

But for instance, there are visible controls—they are available via a central command layer which fuzzy matches virtually every operation available in the debugger. This lister also in-place allows rebinding of any command. The panels don’t disappear when empty to avoid janky consequences that arise in traditional docking systems, like DearImGui’s & others. Panels and tabs are completely orthogonal. I plan to introduce a more familiar docking system which offers, in effect, fast paths for the more granular panel/tab operations.

But the overarching reason why I chose a from scratch UI layer is because DearImGui leads to more janky results and is much less-suited for the ambitions of the frontend. I don’t think the frontend would be nearly as solid had I chosen a different route.

> Clearly they have nothing to offer you: you already know everything anyway.

I definitely don't know everything, and I am always learning from real professionals with real experience. But it's certainly true that you don't have anything to offer to me.

A fair point on the title! I think you can see it from both perspectives. When I chose the title, I was thinking of "untangling" in this sense: In the traditional C program that overuses malloc/free, you end up in a forest of dynamic lifetimes all "tangled together". So, arenas are useful in "untangling those", in the same way that you might untangle cables for your PC by bundling them together.

> A general implication that he came up with this stuff himself, which he didn't.

How in the world did you get this from the article? Of course I didn't invent it, nor did I ever claim (or imply) that.

Yes, although there are debugging techniques you can use to mitigate the issue. For instance, in debug builds, upon popping off an arena, zero all popped pages, and mark them as no-access.

You are exactly the kind of person the intro was intended to filter out. Congratulations on your tantrum.

> But not our Great Prophet Author. He knows the world is a Simple Place where Government Bad and Garbage Collection Bad and Universities Bad and Everyone Else Stupid and Everything Is Easy If You're Not An Idiot and Nothing Changes and Users Are Stupid and Programmers Are Stupid and Educators Are Stupid and everyone's just making everything way too hard and if only people would listen to his rants then they'd stop being so stupid.

Yes.

> And this angry asshole is asking for subscriptions!?

Yes. (and people subscribe)

Whether or not you call what I'm doing self-hosting or not is not really the issue. I am not really interested in fighting over that term - you may be right that I misused it. If so, I apologize for the confusion. Instead, I am interested in real, practical steps that increase individual control over property - which includes code - and decrease the ability of centralized organizations (corporations, governments) to freely exploit that work, thus increasing individual liberty and the freedom to compute.

I agree that Digital Ocean, Substack, and so on still operate as "chokepoints", and that I'd be more hardcore if I really went full-on setting up my own physical machine and my own totally open source web stack. Unfortunately, all of the software in that space is depressingly terrible - surely partly because of the mess that is the web - and it entirely lacks a good user experience, which is a very good argument in favor of these centralized services. For that reason, I've instead favored such centralized services, which is unfortunate but more practical for me, because I am a moron when it comes to running servers.

In my mind, the vision of fully decentralized self-hosting computing will simply never happen as long as this unfortunate technical situation remains - at some point, someone is going to have to really sit down and iron out all of the details in a way that doesn't absolutely suck shit. Like I mentioned in the article, Caddy and Gitea have done a fairly good job at the first few steps, but the tech and generally the whole process is still pretty idiotic, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't have to be.