I took the trouble (and even spent the money) to get to grips with autotools in a structured and detailed way by buying a book [1] about it and reading as much as possible. Yes, it's not trivial, but autotools are not witchcraft either, but as written elsewhere, a masterpiece of engineering. I have dealt with it without prejudice and since then I have been more of a fan of autotools than a hater. Anyway, I highly recommend the book and yes, after reading it, I think autotools is better than its reputation.
I was a co-op at a company in the 90s that specialzed in mechanical simulation of virtual prototypes. The software was primarily used on Unix (most of us used SGI boxes) but there was also a Windows port for smaller jobs and laptop use and (at least the dev environment) was all built on Cygwin.
I checked what "Windows Blog / Microsoft Edge" is about. It says "Microsoft Edge news and product updates for developers focused on Microsoft Edge". If it was for end users, I'd have no problem with such superficial articles. But targeting developers - this is a shame and shows again and again Microsoft's culture around not supporting technically minded people (I don't even think of mentioning the term "hacker" in connection with Microsoft) with understanding what's going on under the hood. This is exactly the core promise of FOSS software and should be an eye-opener for not using proprietary software whenever possible (in this case, MS Edge).
They made a chart where the the 28 bar is 40% of the size of the 32 bar. How to lie with charts. Their intended audience is made of IT news sites publishing filler.
I bought a robot vacuum for the first time last fall. When searching for an appliance and reading test reports, it quickly became clear that I had the most faith in Chinese manufacturers in this product category - what a paradigm shift! And this despite the fact that well-known German brands such as Kärcher and Vorwerk also offer such appliances - when it comes to “classic” vacuum cleaners and household appliances in general, it would never have occurred to me to swap the reputation and quality of these brands for Chinese competitors. Times are changing, German manufacturers are simply left behind when it comes to such new innovations. (I'm German, hence my initial preference for German manufacturers - it's probably similar to iRobot for Americans)
Well, it's not as if this is the first free alternative. Here is a wonderful, incredibly powerful tool, not written in Java, but in Free Pascal, which is probably too often underestimated: Xidel[1]. Just have a look at the features and check its Github page[2]. I've often been amazed at its capabilities and, apart from web scraping, I mainly use it for XQuery executions - so far the latest version 0.9.9 has also implemented XPath/XQuery 3.1 perfectly for my requirements. Another insider tip is that XPath/XQuery 3.1 can also be used to transform JSON wonderfully - JSONiq is therefore obsolete.
We also use BaseX to write restful backends with RestXQ - https://docs.basex.org/12/RESTXQ - the documentation itself is written in XQuery as well and uses a BaseX database as a source.
Interestingly enough, it is one of the only "talked about" languages I have almost no experience with. Even Roc I've watched a few YouTube videos on. I've only really seen Odin mentioned on X, not even a HN post.
I suppose there is also Jai in a similar space as well, although I'm not a devotee to Jonathan Blow and I don't share much of the excitement his followers seem to have.
I do feel Zig has the current trend moving in its favor, with projects like Ghostty and Bun gaining prominence. I think Odin would need something like that to really capture attention.
Odin has commercial applications, basically all the JangaFX apps... But yeah, it's missing a killer open source app. Positive is it has a decent amount of batteries included.
[1] https://nostarch.com/autotools2e
reply