mschae

You could use mine, I guess? https://thebutton.social/?ref=9HCTGA

As someone who has used both (but not for any serious, large projects), I’d say they target different audiences. First and foremost, Zig is not memory-safe in the way Rust is. On the other hand, Zig is way easier to write than unsafe Rust. Rust comes with a lot of features and libraries, while Zig is an intentionally small language, almost minimalistic (kind of like C, but modern).

There are lots of different tradeoffs being made, so yes, I’ll give the boring answer and say they are good for different kinds of projects :)

If it’s specifically low level programming (I’m envisioning programs where you need fairly direct control over memory, IO, etc.), you’d probably quickly need a lot of unsafe in Rust, which can quickly get very complicated to use safely. So I’d probably recommend Zig for that purpose.

Oh man, it’s also available as GNU info. I’ll have to read this.

I was just being pedantic and corrected what is meant by the term “free software”, not actually arguing for or against what you were saying :)

Yes, of course, a project being paid will mean that a lot fewer people will actually use it. I wouldn’t say nobody, though. As an example, there’s the DeArrow browser addon which is free, but costs $1 once (with easy ways to circumvent that payment). Yet many people have paid for it anyway.

As for curl, the article says that the 23 sponsors you mentioned are only corporate sponsors. There are hundreds of people donating to the curl project, which is probably still unreasonably low, but not as dire as “only 23” would suggest. Obviously each of these donates a much lower amount, so it may still not amount to much (but I don’t know enough to say that).

But in the end, as I said, you’re probably mostly right, there would be very few users of free software if it was paid. Although there are also lots of users of proprietary paid software, so who knows.

The “free” in FOSS does not mean price.

The information returned by whois depends on the registry. For example, most registries for European TLDs basically just show whether the domain is registered (I say “most” because I’m not sure whether it’s actually all or if there are exceptions, but I know .de is like this). In that case, there aren’t even “whois privacy” services available from registrars. For TLDs from other countries or gTLDs, this might vary.

In either case, do note what the other comment says. Whois is not the only way to identify who runs a service.

it returns a lot of information such as registrar name, abuse contact, creation date… even though i paid extra for “whois privacy.”

If you didn’t pay for whois privacy, it would most likely return your actual name, email address, phone number, and home address instead. “Whois privacy” just means your registrar inserts their information into these fields instead, and forwards any mail they might get to you.