Quaternion Alternatives

Quaternion reviews and mentions

• OpenSUSE Linux Gains Momentum: A Look at Its Growing Popularity
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 26 Mar 2023

  > Meanwhile there have been exactly zero new F/OSS desktop apps for over a decade except IDEs and even those are mostly Electron-based. What a mess.

  Er, that's just objectively not true. Here's exactly one new FOSS desktop app: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion - I don't know how old it is, but it's a Matrix client and Matrix is only 8 years old so less than a decade.

• Haiku R1/beta4 has been released
  4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Dec 2022
• Notes on Concurrency Bugs
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2022

  In terms of shared-memory threading concurrency, Send and Sync, and the distinction between &T and &Mutex and &mut T, were a revelation when I first learned them. It was a principled approach to shared-memory threading, with Send/Sync banning nearly all of the confusing and buggy entangled-state codebases I've seen and continue to see in C++ (much to my frustration and exasperation), and &Mutex providing a cleaner alternative design (there's an excellent article on its design at http://cliffle.com/blog/rust-mutexes/).

  My favorite simple concurrent data structure is https://docs.rs/triple_buffer/latest/triple_buffer/struct.Tr.... It beautifully demonstrates how you can achieve principled shared mutability, by defining two "handle" types (living on different threads), each carrying thread-local state (not TLS) and a pointer to shared memory, and only allowing each handle to access shared memory in a particular way. This statically prevents one thread from calling a method intended to run on another thread, or accessing fields local to another thread (since the methods and fields now live on the other handle). It also demonstrates the complexity of reasoning about lock-free algorithms (https://github.com/HadrienG2/triple-buffer/issues/14).

  I suppose &/&mut is also a safeguard against event-loop and reentrancy bugs (like https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion/issues/702). I don't think Rust solves the general problem of preventing deadlocks within and between processes (which often cross organizational boundaries between projects and distinct codebases, with no clear contract on allowed behavior and which party in a deadlock is at fault), and non-atomicity between processes on a single machine (see my PipeWire criticism at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31519951). File saving is also difficult (https://danluu.com/file-consistency/), though I find that fsync-then-rename works well enough if you don't need to preserve metadata or write through file (not folder) symlinks.

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