Yuxuan Shui, the developer behind the X11 compositor picom (a fork of Compton) published a blog post detailing their experiences with using GitHub Copilot for a year.

I had free access to GitHub Copilot for about a year, I used it, got used to it, and slowly started to take it for granted, until one day it was taken away. I had to re-adapt to a life without Copilot, but it also gave me a chance to look back at how I used Copilot, and reflect – had Copilot actually been helpful to me?

Copilot definitely feels a little bit magical when it works. It’s like it plucked code straight from my brain and put it on the screen for me to accept. Without it, I find myself getting grumpy a lot more often when I need to write boilerplate code – “Ugh, Copilot would have done it for me!”, and now I have to type it all out myself. That being said, the answer to my question above is a very definite “no, I am more productive without it”. Let me explain.

↫ Yuxuan Shui

The two main reasons why Shui eventually realised Copilot was slowing them down were its unpredictability, and its slowness. It’s very difficult to understand when, exactly, Copilot will get things right, which is not a great thing to have to deal with when you’re writing code. They also found Copilot incredibly slow, with its suggestions often taking 2-3 seconds or longer to appear – much slower than the suggestions from the clangd language server they use.

Of course, everybody’s situation will be different, and I have a suspicion that if you’re writing code in incredibly popular languages, say, Python or JavaScript, you’re going to get more accurate and possibly faster suggestions from Copilot. As Shui notes, it probably also doesn’t help that they’re writing an independent X11 compositor, something very few people are doing, meaning Copilot hasn’t been trained on it, which in turn means the tool probably has no clue what’s going on when Shui is writing their code.

As an aside, my opinion on GitHub Copilot is clear – it’s quite possibly the largest case of copyright infringement in human history, and in its current incarnation it should not be allowed to continue to operate. As I wrote over a year ago:

If Microsoft or whoever else wants to train a coding “AI” or whatever, they should either be using code they own the copyright to, get explicit permission from the rightsholders for “AI” training use (difficult for code from larger projects), or properly comply with the terms of the licenses and automatically add the terms and copyright notices during autocomplete and/or properly apply copyleft to the newly generated code. Anything else is a massive copyright violation and a direct assault on open source.

Let me put it this way – the code to various versions of Windows has leaked numerous times. What if we train an “AI” on that leaked code and let everyone use it? Do you honestly think Microsoft would not sue you into the stone age?

↫ Thom Holwerda

It’s curious that as far as I know, Copilot has not been trained on Microsoft’s own closed-source code, say, to Windows or Office, while at the same time the company claims Copilot is not copyright infringement or a massive open source license violation machine. If what Copilot does is truly fair use, as Microsoft claims, why won’t Microsoft use its own closed-source code for training?

We all know the answer.

Deeply questionable legality aside, do any of you use Copilot? Has it had any material impact on your programming work? Is its use allowed by your employer, or do you only use it for personal projects at home?

Jolie crystallises the programming concepts of service-oriented computing as linguistic constructs. The basic building blocks of software are not objects or functions, but rather services that can be relocated and replicated as needed. A composition of services is a service.

↫ Jolie website

Jolie is open source and available on GitHub.

GCC 14.1 has been released, and it should come as no surprise that the new features are not exactly something I, someone who doesn’t program, can properly parse. So, here’s the three items GCC itself thought were important to list first.

The C frontend when targeting standards newer than C89 now considers many non-standard constructs as errors that were previously only warnings. See https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-14/porting_to.html#warnings-as-errors for more details. C23 _BitInt Bit-precise integer types are now supported, for now only on IA-32, x86-64 and AArch64.

The C++ frontend now implements several C++26 features, some missing C++23 bits and defect report resolutions. Diagnostics involving C++ templates now quote source from the instantiation context.

The libstdc++exp.a library now includes all symbols for the Filesystem TS and the experimental symbols for the C++23 std::stacktrace class, so -lstdc++exp can be used instead of -lstdc++fs. The libstdc++_libbacktrace.a library is not longer installed. Improved experimental support for C++20, C++23, and C++26. Updated parallel algorithms that are compatible with oneTBB.

↫ GCC 14.1 release announcement

GCC 14.1 is available for download, of course, but most of us will get it once it hits our distribution’s package repositories.

We’re all aware of Stack Overflow – it’s a place where programmers and regular users can ask technical questions, and get answers from anyone who thinks they know the answer. Stack Overflow has become so ubiquitous among programmers and developers, the concept of “I just copied the code off Stack Overflow” has become a consistent meme to indicate you don’t fully grasp how something works, but at least it works.

If you’ve ever contributed answers to Stack Overflow, you might want to consider deleting them, altering them, or perhaps even go as far as request a GDPR removal if you’re in the European Union, because Stack Overflow has just announced a close partnership with “AI” company OpenAI (or, more accurately, “Open” “AI”). Stripped of marketing speak, the gist is exactly as you’d expect: OpenAI will absorb the questions and answers on Stack Overflow into its models, whether their respective authors like it or not.

As much as you may want to try and delete your answers if you’re not interesting in having your work generate profit for OpenAI, deleting popular questions and answers is not possible on Stack Overflow. The other option is altering your answers to render them useless, but it seems Stack Overflow is not going to allow you to do this, either. Ben Humphreys tried to alter his highest-rated answers, and Stack Overflow just reverted them back, and proceeded to ban him from the platform.

Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.

So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.

Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.

↫ Ben Humphreys

Now that they’ve made what is most likely an incredibly lucrative deal with OpenAI that’s going to net Stack Overflow’s owners boatloads of money, they obviously can’t let users delete or alter their answers to lower the monetary value of Stack Overflow’s content. Measures to prevent deletion or alteration are probably one of the clauses in the agreement between Stack Overflow and OpenAI. So there’s likely not much you can do to not have your answers sucked into OpenAI, but you should at least be aware it’s happening in case of future answers you might want to contribute.

Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That’s when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college’s General Electric GE-225 mainframe.

Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.

↫ Benj Edwards at Ars Technica

Even I have used BASIC in the past, when I was a child and discovered QBasic (or possibly GW-BASIC, I’m a bit hazy on the details) and started messing around with it. My experiences with BASIC didn’t lead to a path of ever more complex programming languages, but for huge numbers of people, it did – it’s wild just how many people over a certain age got their programming start with BASIC in the 8 bit home computer era.

I mean, 30 GOTO 10 is such a widespread morsel of knowledge it made its way into all kinds of popular media, such as a few Easter egg jokes in Futurama. BASIC has effectively achieved immortality.

Humans speak countless different languages. Not only are these languages incompatible, but runtime transpilation is a real pain. Sadly, every standardisation initiative has failed.

At least there is someone to blame for this state-of-affairs: God. It was him, after-all, who cursed humanity to speak different languages, in an early dispute over a controversial property development.

However, mankind can only blame itself for the fact that computers struggle to talk to each other.

And one of the biggest problems is the most simple: computers do not agree on how to write letters in binary.

↫ Cal Paterson

For most users, character encoding issues are not something they have to deal with. Programmers and other people who deal with the lower levels of computing, however, deal with this way more often than they should.

Over 35 years ago, these problems with software portability led to the emergence of the first POSIX standard in 1988. The acronym was coined by Richard Stallman, who added “X” to the end of Portable Operating System Interface. It’s meant to provide a specification of the interface that different Unix operating systems should have in common, including programming languages and tools. It’s important to note that the interface is portable, and not the implementation.

↫ vorakl

While POSIX certainly isn’t perfect, and support for it in various operating systems claiming to support POSIX even less so, there’s no denying its success. Even if the dream of 100% source code portability isn’t possible under POSIX for applications that are a little more complex than basic CLI tools, there’s enough portability that platforms like Linux, the various BSDs, macOS, and others, can share quite a bit of code.

One of my favourite things about POSIX is that it shows up in the most unexpected of places. Windows, for instance, has had various options for POSIX compatibility, some of which straight from Microsoft itself, like the currently well-known Windows Subsystem for Linux, but also mostly forgotten options like the Microsoft POSIX subsystem that shipped with Windows NT until Windows 2000, or the very rudimentary POSIX compatibility in the Windows C Runtime Library and Windows Sockets API.

OS/2 had POSIX compatibility as well, through EMX (Eberhard Mattes eXtender). It gave OS/2 – and MS-DOS – a POSIX API, and even provided access to native OS/2 APIs as well, and could run 32bit applications. You’d be surprised by how many more operating systems offered forms of POSIX compatibility, either out of the box or through first or third party add-ons.

I made a graphical IRC client that runs in UEFI. It’s written in Rust and leverages the GUI toolkit and TrueType renderer that I wrote for axle’s userspace. I was able to develop it thanks to the vmnet network backend that I implemented for QEMU. I’ve published the code here.

↫ Phillip Tennen

Words are not enough.

I work at Red Hat on GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. For the last five releases of GCC, I’ve been working on -fanalyzer, a static analysis pass that tries to identify various problems at compile-time, rather than at runtime. It performs “symbolic execution” of C source code—effectively simulating the behavior of the code along the various possible paths of execution through it.

This article summarizes what’s new with -fanalyzer in GCC 14, which I hope will be officially released sometime in April 2024.

↫ David Malcolm

No matter how many more of you become a Patreon to keep OSNews alive, I’ll never be able to really add anything meaningful to articles like these.