Maybe in part due to regulatory pressures over privacy, IDN, Chrome includes "site settings" to disable Javascript, etc. on a site by suite basis. It also includes "request blocking" in DevTools. These settings can provide some of the blocking that uBlock provides. To some this can be quite useful. Why there is no way to export and import these settings. It is commmon with open source mobile apps in the www/networking category for example to have the ability to import and export settings.
IME, most websites respond to the Accept-Encoding header, or at least send uncompressed data in the absence of it. I normally do not send this header and I almost always receive uncompressed data. Sometimes there are rare exceptions. (For these I excpetions usually test with Accept-Encoding: identity.) I am generally curious about these exceptions, hence the comment. At least once, the website operator responded indicating it was due to a configuration error.
It’s fair to question someone’s judgment based on their expressed opinions, and take that into account when evaluating what they say later on.
Also, he may just have a different definition of “ideal” than some of us.
>"I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: 'How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!'"
I would argue compile time changes don't matter much, as the amount of data going through zlib all across the world is so large, that any performance gain should more than compensate any additional compilation time (and zlib-rs compiles in a couple of seconds anyway on my laptop).
As for dependencies: zlib, zlib-ng and zlib-rs all obviously need some access to OS APIs for filesystem access if compiled with that functionality. At least for zlib-rs: if you provide an allocator and don't need any of the file IO you can compile it without any dependencies (not even standard library or libc, just a couple of core types are needed). zlib-rs does have some testing dependencies though, but I think that is fair. All in: all of them use almost exactly the same external dependencies (i.e.: nothing aside from libc-like functionality).
zlib-rs is a bit bigger by default (around 400KB), with some of the Rust machinery. But if you change some of that (i.e. panic=abort), use a nightly compiler (unfortunately still needed for the right flags) and add the right flags both libraries are virtually the same size, with zlib at about 119KB and zlib-rs at about 118KB.
That the language includes a package manager that fetches an assortment of libraries from who knows whom on demand doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the process to me. Alice's secure AES implementation might bring Eve's string padding function along for the ride.
Rust(TM) the language might be (memory) safe in theory but I have serious issues (t)rusting (t)rust and anything built with it.
One of the things I like about C is I can download a statically-compiled native GCC for use on a computer with modest amounts of memory, storage and a relatively old, slow CPU. Total size uncompressed is 242.3MB.
Using this I can statically compile a cross-compiler. Total size uncompressed 169.4MB.
I use GCC to compille zlib and a wide variety of other software. I can build an operating system from the ground up.
Perhaps someday during my lifetime it will be possible to compile programs written in Rust using inexpensive computers with modest amounts of memory, storage and relatively slow CPUs. Meanwhille, there is C.
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