No judgement against trying to monetize valuable work, but in this day and nearly everyone expects free and OSS compilers/interpreters and core tooling.

The backend for the DMD compiler was not fully open source for a number of years. That's because Symantec owned some of the code and they were not willing to let it be relicensed. They did allow that in 2017. It was never a paid product AFAIK.

Overall, that was beneficial to the D community. The GDC backend has always been open, and for some time has been part of GCC. The LDC backend was developed to use LLVM. It's possible that there would not have been motivation for those projects if DMD's backend had been open from the start. DMD compiles fast but the performance is not competitive with the other compilers if you're working on something that needs to push the CPU to its limits.

Sadly, the number of people nerdly enough to want to work on a code generator is very, very small. Me, I find it quite enjoyable.

I cannot even think of anyone who wrote a full stack compiler these days.

A lot of software engineer are seeing this as compiler engineer only caring about performance as opposed to other aspect such as debuggability, safety, compile time and productivity etc... I think that's where the "sabotage" comes from. Basically the focus on performance at the detriment of other things.

My 2 cents : The core problem is programmers expecting invariant and properties not defined in the languange standard. The compiler only garanty things as defined in the standard, expecting anything else is problematic.

Every team and sub culture will have an "energy" and different attitude etc... sure

But this is much more than racy poster on the walls... This behavior was never acceptable. I find it fascinating that we have to rediscover and relearn every generation why professional etiquette is so important. And what happens when. We blur the line between professional life and "familial" attitudes

Source? Juicy if true.

But that's not actually the argument really being made here with any evidence. That would be a reasonable argument, but it's also always true - we are human, not robots, that's how humans work in any group setting. So it's not particularly interesting or particular to this that social and other things matter as much as pure technical merit or hard work.

But again, this isn't the argument the post makes. Instead, in this case, the argument being made is (basically) "Nobody in those rooms is operating in good faith, they are instead deliberately trying to make it harder for newcomers. They also only have any power at all through illegitimate means in the first place".

I do not believe any of this to be true.

No reasonable amount of engineering resources would have made a dent in the problem. What OP is calling "weaponization of complexity" is just the asymmetry of effort required between new comers and entrenched players.

You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work"

We have seen this played out in any industry in history. Sometime hard work is not enough and it's easy to abuse dominant position to grid lock a market.

The rest of your post frankly sounds like someone who is drunk on the usual company cooliad.

> The end goal is to help user

No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS.

>The world has never been built by those throwing rocks from the sidelines, no matter how much they want it to be, and no matter how much they try to paint the hard problem-solving work of others as "weaponization of complexity

So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman. OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us.

> In the end, the world is 99% built by those who show up and do it. That's how this "weaponization of complexity" happened - people showed up and tried to solve problems. The world evolved. They tried to keep moving forward as that happened.

Yeah no. History disagree with you

This literally makes no sense. What does it mean to have a high asymmetry but somehow, "no amount" can make a dent in the problem. The claim in the OP is about engineering effort, not about "it's hard to get people to want your product" or whatever.

So what exactly are you trying to say here?

"You would have to be naive to think that google would just open their arms and kumbaya with microsoft to do the "hard work""

I mean, i was there for Google, with plenty of others, and I know what we were thinking, because I was partially in charge of it? Please, tell me more about what I and others were thinking. Were you there? Do you have any data or evidence?

The naive thing is usually thinking people on the internet with no actual knowledge won't make up a history that suits their narrative.

"No. The end goal is to make money. Sometime it requires helping user, other time a bunch of anti competitive ( forcing android oem to prevent meaningful forks)and anti consumer (like playing hard ball with ad blockers) BS."

Again, please produce evidence rather than conjecture. What actual first hand evidence are you presenting here? (IE not opinions of random internet people who were not involved in any way). There actually are some folks involved who have this view, but my experience is they are far outnumbered by those actually trying to help. But you haven't even gone so far as to provide evidence from one of these folks who does disagree with my view!

"So much wrong with this. And is just a strawman. OP is not saying that it's not hard problem solving. The point is the solution achieved is self serving and sucks for the rest of us."

If so much is wrong with it, describe it. You've also now switched arguments from "no amount of engineering will make a dent" to "i don't like the solution they engineered". Which is it, exactly?

"Yeah no. History disagree with you"

Then, again, it should be really easy to produce evidence of this from folks involved. Where is it?