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Comment by thrtythreeforty | Hacker News Reader

I hope you'll reconsider this in the long term, not because I think Windows/macOS are great (my feelings for them range between "ugh" and abject horror depending on the day).

Rather, I think it would be good because it makes a language much more palatable for mainstream adoption if it's possible for programs written to be ported to Windows/macOS. Languages need the positive adoption feedback loop. Rust would not be as mature and stable as it is today if it were relegated to Linux server programming.

That said - I can appreciate keeping a small target for the language in the beginning. It allows you to concentrate efforts and achieve an MVP much sooner than you would be able to if you had to deal with Windows BS :)

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The language is standardized. I encourage you to write an implementation for any platform you wish, or maintain a fork of our compiler/stdlib for your platform of choice. We're not interested in it upstream, but that does not prevent the community from providing for these use-cases.

Honestly that really kills my interest I have in the language. That’s not realistically going to happen (a reimplementation) or go well (maintaining a fork) with a (frankly) niche language.

I suspect the pool of people who develop locally (on Win or Mac, and need something functional if not optimal) and deploy to Linux is not small.

Is there a particular reason? io-uring?

As other commenters alluded to, it's an ideological and practical decision. We simply prefer free software operating systems. We do not care to legitimize nonfree platforms, and we prefer to be able to read (and patch) the code to understand the tools we depend on. If that's a deal-breaker for you, no worries - Hare does not have to appeal to everyone to achieve its goals.

For those not familiar with the concept: this is how moral backbone looks like.

This is not "moral backbone" in the slightest - the Hare developers are not risking anything to take this position, unlike others who may lose their jobs, be imprisoned, or even lose their lives for taking a moral stance.

Many fail on "risking leaving money on the table", long way before "risking loosing their life".

Small steps are steps never the less.

This may lead the design to be inappropriately coupled to ELF, which isn't the best binary format in the world or anything. There are real differences in MachO and PE.

I don't think our design is particularly coupled to ELF. We only really do one thing with it (store the test array in an ELF section), which can be done differently for another platform, and isn't the end of the world if omitted anyway.

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