I tend to write anything for distribution in Rust or something that compiles to a standalone binary. Python does not an easily redistributable application make lol

For flash I think you’re describing Ruffle

Rust libraries are statically linked by default yes, except for a couple of rather low level ones (glibc and a couple others I think) - Honestly though I’d be surprised if you come across a situation where it’s something necessary to think about in practice

rust is both high and low level

I like to describe this as “low level language with high level ergonomics”

Sounds like you want the Rust Book: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/

Edit: Just realized you said you didn’t like it sorry

WINE is open source, so it’s not stealing to use it

As someone who has written a lot of PHP professionally over the last ~13 years (and a fair bit of other languages - JS, Rust, C++, Python … I try to reach for whatever solution fits the problem) I feel your frustration with some things but wanted to point out that some of those things that have changed heavily in just the last 4-5 years. Apologies in advance for the wall of text, lol:

The PHP debugger has been one of the most frustrating debuggers I’ve ever had the displeasure of trying to setup…

That’s still pretty valid. XDebug is still utter garbage to work with in my opinion. I wish it were better. That said, I haven’t tried actually using it in several years so it could be better and I just don’t know about it.

Also, to use PHP sensibly, you have to learn about zend

Zend hasn’t really been industry-relevant in some 12-13 years, and yeah … it was super rough. I basically hated every line of Zend code I ever wrote.

That said… the same kind of thing is true for a lot of languages. To use Python sensibly (for web, anyway…) you have to learn Flask or Django. To use Rust sensibly you have to learn Actix, Warp, Axum, or Tide. To use JS sensibly, you have to learn React or Vue or Svelte or Alpine or any of the thousand frameworks that come out for it daily.

For PHP the big ones are Laravel, Symfony (Laravel uses a fair bit of it under the hood), CodeIgniter, and CakePHP.

or whatever the name of that big framework is.

The most popular framework over the last decade or so is Laravel, and it’s also my favorite. So I’m assuming that’s the one you mean. And… yeah, even modern PHP wouldn’t really be worth writing without it in my opinion. It focuses hugely on developer experience, greasing the wheels in huge ways and eliminating loads of boilerplate both in-app and in its tooling. It is SO SO SO SO SO MUCH BETTER than the others in my personal opinion. Genuinely transformative to the PHP experience, tries to make things as frustration-free as it can.

There are of course many rather valid criticisms of it - Mostly around how being “batteries included” means it’s rather opinionated. Using Laravel means you either do things the Laravel way or you struggle… but with how much it simplifies, it winds up being worth learning to do things the Laravel way in my experience.

But that can break in the most mysterious ways and for PHP beginners it can be a nightmare to understand what went wrong.

For raw PHP in general … yeah. again, I agree. Yet again though, that’s also true for lots of other languages (explain a segfault to a C++ beginner), and thankfully Laravel includes a very detailed and helpful stack trace and debugging page - Any thrown exception will result in a page like this with an interactive stack trace:

I think Symfony, CodeIgniter, and CakePHP all include something similar these days.

Add in that its favorite pattern is dependency injection

Patterns are a preference thing, I realize it’s not for everyone. I don’t generally use dependency injection

and the language isn’t typed

Modern PHP is actually typed! It doesn’t require that you use types, but you can absolutely specify types for variables, class attributes, function parameters, return values… And an exception will be thrown if something tries to use an incorrect type. It is still dynamically typed, so it’s done at runtime. Which kinda bites sometimes. However, there are static analysis tools like PHPStan that do a great job of helping avoid typing-related issues.

It’s not a perfect typing system but since sometime around PHP ~7.2 it became fairly nice to typehint basically everywhere and it’s only continued to mature and get better over time - It’s missing some things of course (I want generics!), but it’s way better than the nightmare that was PHP 5 and older.

One of my bigger gripes is that many projects do not use containers whatsoever…

Yeah this is another thing that is a “vanilla PHP issue” that Laravel solves quite will imho - Through a very batteries-included package called sail. For most Laravel projects, it’s a one-time 10-minute setup/configuration process for the developer, which should become a single command for other devs. And even then all it does is setup a bunch of sane defaults for running docker compose up, along with a bunch of shortcuts for running commands within the containers. Just today, I lent a coworker a hand with a project they had already set up to run via sail, and it was

git clone [project]
cd [project]
sail up

and I had a working setup as soon as the containers were ready.

Sorry, I didn’t initially set out to write this as a love letter to Laravel, but I noticed your frustration appeared to be (largely) related to older versions of PHP and thought I’d mention that things have changed loads in the past few years. And then basically any time I’m doing something in PHP I use Laravel because I like it; And I work in PHP a lot because I work for a mostly-PHP shop. That said, even when I’m working in other languages, I often find myself wishing I had features from Laravel. Stuff like collections, Eloquent, storage disks, pipelines… It’s a long list.

Well that looks neat.

Not even technically, actually. Wine and proton are translation layers that basically provide a dictionary of system calls so that Windows-specific ones can be translated to Linux calls instead

Toilet paper is wood, while the seats are plastic. Wood is a 2.5-ish on the mohs scale, and plastics tend to be too. So they scratch at a 2.5 with deeper grooves at a level 3, even on a micro scale. The alternative is to use ceramics for the seat, but the fragility means one rough drop of the seat and it could shatter. Metals are generally no better.

Assigned Grinch At Birth

Yeah, even with my relatively limited Esperanto familiarity (mi estas ankoraŭ komencanto, sed mi povas legi kaj skribi iomete), I was originally confused by it as well when I started using it a few months ago. Then when I saw the explanation on the faq, I just found myself wondering why the heck they used g instead of ĝ.

Forgejo is a drop in replacement

Forgejo (a gitea fork) is a better choice for FOSS, can’t remember why.

I’m a fan of Alacritty, it’s written in rust and uses GPU rendering to be one of the fastest terminals on the planet. Sounds odd but genuinely makes a difference

I keep mine in a self hosted Nextcloud instance, DAV sync is built into the app

Truly in a clbottom of its own

Well that’s easy to remember!

Conflicts haven’t been an issue for years, all modern iterations of KeePass (XC, kp2a, DX) support automatically merging in the latest before saving.

I’ve been using it for years this way across several devices, it’s incredibly solid

Store your database in a nextcloud instance and it’s that too