"If it cannot be read and completely understood in a month, it's broken beyond repair."

My new mantra in #FreeSoftware development.

@Shamar
Do you grant exceptions to enormous projects, or is considering them broken a feature? :>

@timorl

No exception.

Enormous projects produce enormous risks (when not enormous threats).

It's time to move beyond the stone ages of #Informatics.

@Shamar
Do you have any compilers you like? They seem to be kind of big and complicated by necessity, and I am wondering whether there are some simple ones that are still useful.

@timorl

I used to trust #GCC.

I spent a huge amount of my free time over the last 2 years to port it to my operating system (a Plan 9 fork).

In fact, Jehanne has been the first Plan 9 fork to run a modern GCC (9.2.0) and compile C++ programs correctly.

Then, with the removal of #RMS by the GCC Steering Committee, I realized they cannot be trusted: https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235285.html

Indeed they are discussing to leave #GNU in these days.

Now I'm exploring the alternatives.

So far, #TinyCC looks promising: https://bellard.org/tcc/

Other alternatives are listed here http://suckless.org/rocks/ but some requires either linker or assembler.

And while I obviously ported GNU binutils too, I prefer to avoid this toolchain since they are all showing they do not give a shit about free software, but about "#IBM, #Google, #Facebook, #ARM, or other big supporters" https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2021-April/235367.html

A serious alternative could be the 9front compiler suite that I dismissed years ago because I was still naive (dumb).

Also, it's urgent to design better programming languages, and for "better" I mean simpler both for humans and for compilers/interpreters. So that all people will be able to read the software they use.

But the point remains: if it cannot be completely read and understood in at most a month by a single professional programmer, it's broken beyond repair and need to be replaced.

@Shamar I was mostly interested in the simplicity aspect, I think most compilers I know would not satisfy the "one month" requirement. Politics aside, do you think gcc can be understood within a month?

Strong agree on better programming languages being needed, but the ones I consider good for creating programs that follow the simplicity ideology are not that simple themselves, and definitely don't have simple compilers. I expect there might be some very hard to resolve conflict between these requirements.

@timorl

GCC does not satisfy the "one month" requirement: that's why we need better compilers (and languages)

But this IS a political issue!

If you cap complexity, you reduce costs and this way you reduce the power corporation can extort to users.

If you can rewrite anything you run in a month, no company is going to betray your trust.

As for the "simplicity ideology with complex compilers" you are talking about, I think you are confusing simplicity and easiness.

Simplicity is very different from easiness: simplicity provides freedom, easiness produce lock-in. But more often than not, simple tools requires more mental effort than easy one.

IMHO simplicity should always be preferred in Free Software.