Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamatologist | Hacker News Reader

Sebastien Marie wanted to make Zig work on OpenBSD. I don’t know why Raadt then respondend by saying that Zig hasn’t proved that it can do what it claims to do. But maybe I don’t understand this mailing list’s culture (or what “import Zig” means in this context other then to port to OpenBSD).

View on HN

> I don’t know why Raadt then respondend by saying that Zig hasn’t proved that it can do what it claims to do.

I know why. It's because Zig hasn’t proved that it can do what it claims to do.

Does an application need to prove it can do what it claims to do before it can be ported to OpenBSD? Seems like a high bar. :-)

It's not a high bar, just plain honesty. I remember a while ago someone was promoting a language called v, making many claims of which some turned out completely untrue. This might be a norm in commercial software - some people believe that you can't sell anything if you don't exaggerate - but the open source world in general prefers a more honest approach. Hence many projects always remaining at 0.x release, for example.

It is a high bar that makes OpenBSD in security-sensitive roles way more appealing than a distribution with a lower bar. That high bar paid for itself repeatedly when I ran OpenBSD in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Fair enough.

That's true, but not for the ports collection. There's all sorts of software there with historically bad track records in security. That's the point...it's just ports of a bunch of popular software.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com