Four Years of Jai (2024)

Surprising deep and level headed analysis. Jai intrigues me a lot, but my cantankerous opinion is that I will not waste my energy learning a closed source language; this ain’t the 90s any more.

I am perfectly fine for it to remain a closed alpha while Jonathan irons out the design and enacts his vision, but I hope its source gets released or forked as free software eventually.

What I am curious about, which is how I evaluate any systems programming language, is how easy it is to write a kernel with Jai. Do I have access to an asm keyword, or can I easily link assembly files? Do I have access to the linker phase to customize the layout of the ELF file? Does it need a runtime to work? Can I disable the standard library?

Iirc, pretty sure jblow has said he's open sourcing it. I think the rough timeline is: release game within the year, then the language (closed-source), then open source it.

Tbh, I think a lot of open source projects should consider following a similar strategy --- as soon as something's open sourced, you're now dealing with a lot of community management work which is onerous.

> as soon as something's open sourced, you're now dealing with a lot of community management work which is onerous.

This is a common misconception. You can release the source code of your software without accepting contributions.

It's not a "misconception". Open source implying open contributions is a very common stance, if not even the mainstream stance. Source availability is for better or for worse just one aspect of open source.

Would you say that SQLite is not open source?

Yes. I'd call it source available instead. Although it does have some hallmarks of open source, such as its funding.

Source available is already a well understood term that does not mean this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source-available_software

Reading the preamble there, and the parapgraph after that, I find what I said to be consistent what the page is saying there.

> Any software is source-available in the broad sense as long as its source code is distributed along with it, even if the user has no legal rights to use, share, modify or even compile it.

You have the legal right to use, share, modify, and compile, SQlite's source. If it were Source Available, you'd have the right to look at it, but do none of those things.

But not necessarily any of the other things! Big difference. Please read it again.

That's your assertion, I am saying that it is not correct in the general way that people understand the terms "open source" and "source available."

I doubt we're going to come to an agreement here, though, so I'll leave it at that.