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A Map for the Regulation and Destruction of Free Software.
A buddy of mine shared an article about The White House warning people against programming in C or C++ and it teed me off about a conspiracy theory I've been harboring for going on 10 years now.
My baseline assumption is that whatever you choose to call this weird woke, centralized, authoritarian, elite/bureaucratic corporatist conglomerate, they want control. All of it. Over things that you would think have nothing to do with them. They want your wood ovens, your gas stoves, your gamer PCs, they really don't view anything as beyond their purview to "regulate" and make your life infinitely worse by slow degrees.
If you assume these are pathologically controlling busy bodies, which I think you are right to assume, the fact that anybody can program anything probably terrifies them. They barely understand technology to begin with. Just look at any time they haul a tech CEO before congress and attempt to get sound bites for their constituents. It's horrible. But the cat is more or less already out of the bag when it comes to open and free software. How would you put it back in?
By degrees the process is already underway, in the name of security. Most PC's sold today will only boot authorized operation systems, with an option in the BIOS (for now) to turn off that safety feature. Windows warns you every time you try to run an "unrecognized" executable, with the option (for now) of ignoring it's warning. People are far more habituated than ever to closed software ecosystems thanks to Apple and Google and the fact that most people spend more time on phones these days than computers. All it would take is to slowly shave away by degrees until the process of running free and open software is so frustrating that most people don't do it, and the powers that be can "deprecate the feature" under the rationale that it's not used anymore.
Maybe it starts with the big sellers of PCs like Dell, where they just don't have a BIOS that lets you boot unauthorized OSes. And for a while, that's fine, because what self respecting enthusiast buys a Dell? That's probably a perfectly fine security compromise for institutions that don't want to run the risk at all of some unauthorized code hijacking the boot process. Then maybe the feature gets cut from lower end motherboards. But that's fine, if it's still a feature that matters to you, you can always get a high end motherboard. Lots of features are only available on higher end motherboards. And then one day, with little fanfare at all, the feature vanishes.
So now you are stuck running increasingly enshittified versions of Windows and a few select Linux distros. So what?
Well, at the same time, imagine how Windows slowly chips away at the ability to run "unrecognized" code. Right now it's an annoying popup, same as it has been since Vista. Maybe one day the default behavior is switched to not letting you run it at all. But it's ok, there is a toggle to turn on the old behavior burried deep in the system settings somewhere. Maybe a security submenu. Then a while later they get rid of that, but if you know what you are doing, there is still a registry setting you can change. Then a while later they only support the feature on Windows Pro instead of Home. Then one day, it just vanishes.
So now you are stuck running enshittified versions of Windows that refuses to run "unrecognized" code. But it's cool, you can probably still do something to get your code "recognized" right?
Anyone who has had to do any web development probably knows about using self signed certs. Often good enough for local use, generally insufficient if you plan on letting anyone outside of your org attempt to use your system. You have to get a signed cert. And often pieces of software just expect a signed cert, and may not have any option at all to override it's refusal to work with a self signed one. I expect much the same will occur with "unrecognized" code.
All code will need to be signed. Maybe you can self sign code you've written on your local system, but nobody else will be able to run it. Unless they go through the added hoops of adding your key to some sort of key store for "recognized" code. But eventually the self signed qualities of the code will catch up to you, and Windows may just refuse to accept self signed code certs anymore. But no fear! Maybe Github or other organization will offer to sign your code for you. Assuming it meets their TOS, nobody on social media has cancelled you, and their AI hasn't rejected your project for hallucinated reasons. But eventually, however well relying on a 3rd party like Github to allow your code to run on your locked down operating system and your locked down hardware starts off, it will become a barely viable solution. And then free and open software is over.
I hope I'm just being overly pessimistic. But I honestly see this happening in my lifetime.
There is a nice culture war troll angle with some parts of the Rust programming language community being associated with leftist political drama. Rust is a popular safe language that solves most memory safety issues and some thread safety issues. I can see someone authoring a bait piece about taking my 'freedumb' to use C++ from my cold dead hands and forcing me to use communist Rust.
You will own no memory, and you will be happy.
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No need for bait at all. Rust being associated with leftist political drama is sufficient reason to reject it.
Man.
It’s like you’re asking partisans to stake a claim on more of your stuff.
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That's easy for people who don't write on bare metal for a living to say.
Alas, every single part of modern computing is involved with such characters, including every single alternative. C++ is no exception.
Actually it’s C which is no exceptions, necessitating the use of return codes to indicate success or error
Booo! Get better material!
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I'm a C++ programmer. Not quite as "bare metal" as when I was doing embedded C (sprinkled with assembler) on machines too small for an OS, or occasionally writing microcode, but not one of those airy-fairy interpreted languages either.
The C++ standards committee is not telling anyone that black lives are more important than whatever corner case DR is in play today. I'm sure its members are plenty pozzed and there's DEI initiatives in its general direction, but Rust is just worse. (With Go somewhere in the middle)
Apologies, fellow bit twiddler.
I don't know though, my latest trip to cppcon didn't exactly give me a different vibe from Rust conferences. And the latest Rust drama revolves around the core team telling community managers to fuck off with their coup attempts.
I would have agreed with you a few years ago when Rust had a bunch of literal tankies on staff, but a lot of those didn't go the distance (even Klabnik himself went away).
Nowadays it's a big managerial blob that is only different from the C++ one because it's staffed by younger people. That must have some moderating effects but in practice that whole side of the industry is converged to the max.
The rust subreddit is all californian ideology shitlibs all the time and much more ideologically moderated than most cpp forums though, I'll give you that. It is Reddit after all.
That said there's another side of it these days, lots of crypto projects use Rust and they are the ones hiring for actual jobs. Much to the chagrin of the aforementioned redditors. And the culture there ranges from standard lolberts to software-as-holy-war gigabased.
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