Oh! Rust rewrite sounds very promising!
Many thanks and best wishes
--
Regards,
Mindaugas
2025-06-13 21:21, Ben Pfaff rašė:
The GUI bugs are a different category, for sure. I feel despair about
the GUI, too, not because of automatically generated and submitted
reports but because I find that GTK+ in C is really difficult to
understand and use properly and interface to our engine.
My current concept for the rewrite, regarding the GUI, is to separate
the GUI and the engine. The engine can run on its own, in its own
process, unaffected by any kind of problem in the GUI. If the GUI
crashes, then it can just restart and reconnect to the running engine.
Separating into two processes also raises the possibility of writing
the engine and the GUI in different languages (for example, the GUI
could be implemented in Python, or in Javascript/Typescript) or
domains (e.g. in a web browser).
I have a of code written already (it looks like it's about 37000 lines
of Rust) but it does not add up to a useful program yet. Probably, an
equivalent of pspp-convert or pspp-output will be the first useful
program.
You can clone what I have from git://benpfaff.org/pspp
<http://benpfaff.org/pspp>. It's in the `rust` branch. The Git history
is a mess, don't bother reading it, just look at the files. I do have
a rewrite of the manual available for browsing:
https://benpfaff.org/~blp/book/html/
On Fri, Jun 13, 2025 at 11:00 AM Friedrich Beckmann
<friedrich.beckm...@posteo.de> wrote:
you are a brave man! I just made some first steps with embedded
rust and found it a new learning experience. I thought that this
must be the feeling of new students when you read compiler
messages and they just do not mean a lot to you. Then I copied the
messages to google hoping to find something reasonable. But I
liked all concepts I found and were new to me.
Many recent bugs are gui bugs quite often resulting in a crash. I
have the feeling to work on some pretty old historic stuff with
the gtk3 concepts where we are now at gtk 3.24.49. Maybe graphs
could be rendered on a webbrowser via plotly. It seems that the
gui handling with all the signals at various places are kind of
very difficult to keep under control.
> Am 13.06.2025 um 19:43 schrieb Ben Pfaff <b...@cs.stanford.edu>:
>
> It's impossible to keep up with the flood of "security" bugs
that people generate automatically and submit. I am not going to try.
>
> I'm working on rewriting PSPP in Rust, which will by itself
eliminate all of these and produce a better piece of software anyhow.
>
