Strong Foundations: FreeBSD, Wikimedia Raise Buckets of Development Money

mbadolato writes "On December 9, 2012, Slashdot reported that the FreeBSD Foundation was falling short of their 2012 goal of $500,000 by nearly 50%. For all of those that continued to echo about how FreeBSD is dying, it's less than three weeks later and the total is presently nearing $200,000 OVER the goal. Netcraft continues to be wrong." And reader hypnosec adds another crowdfunding success story: "The Wikimedia Foundation has announced at the conclusion of its ninth annual fund-raiser that it has managed to raise a whopping $25 million from 1.2 million donors in just over a week's time. ... As compared to last year's fund-raiser, which got completed in 46 days, this year's was completed in just nine days."

Fundraisers vs Time

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

Should I point out that at the point that the FreeBSD fundraiser was on Slashdot as being a failure, it had only been running for 4 days and had reached nearly half of it's goal...?

Re:Go / Rust / Nimrod trump C++

[TheRaven64]

We currently have a few C++ things in the base system:

• LLVM/Clang, the biggest bit, which is the C/C++ (and Objective-C) compiler.
• libstdc++, libsupc++, libc++ and libcxxrt, which are the old and new STL and C++ runtime libraries, respectively.
• devd, which is the utility responsible for performing actions in response to device events (USB device inserted, battery low, and so on).

In a few days, there will also be a BSDL replacement for the GPL'd device tree compiler landing. This is a simple tool that converts between source and flattened device trees, and since it is doing a lot of stuff that involves building maps I decided to use C++ and std::map rather than reinvent the wheel or do something ugly involving macros. Performance isn't an issue, since it's intended to parse input files that are typically under 12KB and produce output that is even smaller, so even without optimisation it uses around 10KB of RAM and under a tenth of a second of CPU time. A higher-level language might have been appropriate, but it's also potentially important to be able to include a statically linked copy for recovery, which rules out most high-level languages.

Note that none of the kernel, and no userland utilities essential for operation are written in C++.