# Dart language port for FreeBSD.



## superriva (Mar 8, 2017)

Hello.

Maybe who can do Dart language port for FreeBSD? It will be very great.

Thank you in advance.


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## tobik@ (Mar 8, 2017)

See https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/10260.


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## superriva (Mar 8, 2017)

tobik@ said:


> See https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/10260.



Yes. I have found this topic yet. But it's not clear what did they come to as a result.  Go works on Freebsd, why Dart can't.


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## SirDice (Mar 8, 2017)

Ports are a community effort. Nobody is getting paid to create or maintain ports for FreeBSD. Porting takes time and effort. Somebody has to be willing and able to invest that time and effort. Most software will easily compile on FreeBSD, but sometimes software doesn't and requires extensive modifications in order to get it to work.


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## superriva (Mar 8, 2017)

SirDice said:


> Ports are a community effort. Nobody is getting paid to create or maintain ports for FreeBSD. Porting takes time and effort. Somebody has to be willing and able to invest that time and effort. Most software will easily compile on FreeBSD, but sometimes software doesn't and requires extensive modifications in order to get it to work.



Thank you. 
I have been working for 10 years with FreeBSD and I know what ports are. My topic is only a way to understand a state of Dart on FreeBSD. Maybe who can give more information about porting problems.


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## Preetpal (Apr 14, 2017)

superriva said:


> Thank you.
> I have been working for 10 years with FreeBSD and I know what ports are. My topic is only a way to understand a state of Dart on FreeBSD. Maybe who can give more information about porting problems.



Well based on https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/issues/10260, it appears that Google doesn't particularly care about support for the Dart virtual machine on BSD operating systems. Someone took the time to port Dart to OpenBSD, but they do not care to pull in their changes because they literally do not want to support OpenBSD specific files to create clutter in a directory in their source code repository (https://github.com/dart-lang/sdk/tree/master/runtime/bin) that already contains files specific to operating systems such as Google Fuschia, Windows, Android, Linux (yes, they keep separate files for Android and Linux despite the for former being an instance of the latter), and macOS.


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## didier (Oct 2, 2021)

Maybe, try a linux jail : https://wiki.freebsd.org/LinuxJails


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

Is there substantial interest for Dart in this part of the community? It would be great for people who are interested in using the product, to express interest here, so that people who might be able to help port (or the first party product owner themselves) can see there is interest. People have limited amount of time, so gauging interest is a great starting point.


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## Alain De Vos (Oct 2, 2021)

I think Dart/Flutter is good for a GSM. (which does not run freebsd)


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

Alain De Vos said:


> I think Dart/Flutter is good for a GSM. (which does not run freebsd)


By GSM, do you mean mobile phone? If you do, you are right that is one of the uses of the language, but it is a Turing Complete language, and can be used in other places for other applications, so I am not sure exactly what you are saying.


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## zirias@ (Oct 2, 2021)

majortom said:


> It would be great for people who are interested in using the product, to express interest here, so that people who might be able to help port (or the first party product owner themselves) can see there is interest.


Looks like you don't _want_ to understand that's of no use at all (well most of the time, except maybe if a company actually wants their product to be used on FreeBSD, and pays a dev to make it happen, but how likely is _that_?), but:


majortom said:


> People have limited about of time


That's (very) true of course. Still, in the OSS world, someone has to be interested themselves to start working. Maybe "advertising" would help  – but seriously, the best course of action if you want a port is still: learn yourself what's necessary and just do it.


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## sidetone (Oct 2, 2021)

That was last time. Maybe this time, the person learns/learned to respect the porting process. (uh, apparently not)

I've never submitted a port, but I've looked at Makefiles, and complex ones take a lot of work compared to simpler Makefiles, as I can see.


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

Zirias said:


> Looks like you don't _want_ to understand that's of no use at all (well most of the time, except maybe if a company actually wants their product to be used on FreeBSD, and pays a dev to make it happen, but how likely is _that_?), but:



Looks like you cannot accept that others might want to gage interest before investing time in something. However, while you keep claiming that the only approach for ports to happen is for the person interested in the product to do the work themselves, that is clearly an absurd position. There are many ways it could happen, especially if there is enough interest among people who want to use the product.

To help you understand this, I will list many ways these things happen (and have happened in FreeBSD's past as well):


the company who is the primary owner sees a lot of interest and decides to make a version available for this platform. That is how the CenOS and Amazon Linux versions of Swift happened, with the work funded and done by Apple.
a group of people no one of which could justify all the work needed to do a port by themselves could form and do the port as a group.
a group of users without the time (and maybe also lacking the expertise) could decide to pay someone (either themselves or _via_ donations to the FreeBSD Foundation) to do the port.
someone with signing authority at a company, could see that there is enough interest, and decide that funding a port would be a good use of some corporate charitable (or Open Source Support) dollars.
an individual with more than enough money (something not lacking in tech) could see the interest and decide to fund the project alone.
someone decides that they want a product to be available and they just go off and do it.
For every example except the last, judging interest and finding others with shared interest are critical steps in making a project happen.



Zirias said:


> That's (very) true of course. Still, in the OSS world, someone has to be interested themselves to start working. Maybe "advertising" would help  – but seriously, the best course of action if you want a port is still: learn yourself what's necessary and just do it.



The open source software world is just like the commercial software world. Products get done for several different reasons:


Personal/corporate need (this product is important enough for internal/personal needs that it does not make any difference if anyone else cares, it needs to get done).
Shared need (a group of people and/or companies) get together and decide to contribute resources (developers, money, hardware, _etc._) and jointly create a product.
Finally, I will ask you the question are you actually interested in using Dart on FreeBSD? If not, what value do you add this this thread by posting that only your way of doing these projects is valid?


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## sidetone (Oct 2, 2021)

Porting is fundamental to everything for using a program on FreeBSD.

If you've seem how Flash didn't support FreeBSD, even after a lot of interest from the community, it had to be ported by volunteers who wanted to use it. At some point, people realized Flash wasn't worth it, and it was being replaced by something much better, HTML5.

Whether or not a company wants to port something, volunteers' efforts and the way of porting has to be respected. It could be a joint effort by both a company and volunteers. Even a company that did it on its own would have to port it, by using, the porting process.


majortom said:


> by posting that only your way of doing these projects is valid?


While ignoring the potential volunteer/maintainer/submitter aspect? The whole porting process is valid, no matter if a company finds enough interest in it to do it, or if FreeBSD users do it on their own.


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

sidetone said:


> I've never submitted a port, but I've looked at Makefiles, and complex ones take a lot of work compared to simpler Makefiles, as I can see.


You have never submitted a port. I am also guessing that you have never hired a team of people to port software, nor have you ever put together consortia of people/companies to fund do a port. How then are you such an expert on what is needed?

As a simple example, there is an early version of Swift 5.5 for FreeBSD, that was done completely outside the FreeBSD ports process. There may never be a version of the software that makes it into the ports/packages tree, but that will not matter at all to those people interested in using it.


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## sidetone (Oct 2, 2021)

majortom said:


> You have never submitted a port. I am also guessing that you have never hired a team of people to port software, nor have you ever put together consortia of people/companies to fund do a port. How then are you such an expert on what is needed?


Who are you to boss people around? And that was classic shaming for your insipid argument, and you don't like getting called out on it.

You've never submitted a port. Who are you to disrespect the efforts of maintainers and submitters, by undermining and ignoring the work it takes for them that is needed for a port to be available? At least I respect and appreciate their work, unlike you. At least I learn the process about Makefiles, and help them out with improvements. I know more about it than someone who shows up on here and whines and doesn't appreciate the work of porters. That may not make me an expert, but you're less of one. At least I've worked on building a port and made it run on my computer, and I don't come in here with your demanding attitude.

At least I don't sit here, and make keep forcing suggestions that something must absolutely be ported on FreeBSD, and make post after post after it aggressively. Yeah, but classic denial, keep insisting you didn't do these things, because of your particular wording, while you're doing it.

Plain and simple: you don't respect the process.


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

sidetone said:


> Porting is fundamental to everything for using a program on FreeBSD.


If by "porting" you mean the FreeBSD community ports/package process you are clearly wrong. The mail system I use hosted on FreeBSD is not part of the FreeBSD ports/packages system/process and yet it is a well supported product based on various open source tools. There are even commercial products that are available to run on FreeBSD, none of which are part of that process.


sidetone said:


> If you've seem how Flash didn't support FreeBSD, even after a lot of interest from the community, it had to be ported by volunteers who wanted to use it. At some point, people realized Flash wasn't worth it, and it was being replaced by something much better, HTML5.


No, at no point did "people realize Flash wasn't worth it", Apple decided not to allow Flash to run on iOS and instead to support HTML 5. (Go read _Thoughts on Flash_ by Steve Jobs.) Flash was a commercial product and would never have been part of the open source ports process. People tried to create an open source Flash compatible system and it was never very compatible.


sidetone said:


> Whether or not a company wants to port something, volunteers' efforts and the way of porting has to be respected.


Again, no. You have interest in some hallowed process. Many people just want a product and are happy to find many ways to make that happen. The part that so interests you, comes much, much later for people that actually make resource allocation decisions.


sidetone said:


> It could be a joint effort by both a company and volunteers. Even a company would have to port it, by using, the porting process.


Completely wrong. As I already pointed out, there are commercial products that run on FreeBSD, none of those went through the process on which you spend some much energy focused. There are many open source products that have releases for FreeBSD that are not in the ports/packages tree.


sidetone said:


> Ignoring the potential volunteer/maintainer/submitter aspect? The whole porting process is valid, no matter if a company finds interest in it to do it, or if FreeBSD users do it on their own.


No one has ever said it is not valid, all that keeps being said is that it is not the focus of the people asking these questions. Maybe later, if someone is interested in working through that, it might be of interest. Your view that worrying about some future approach is more important than gaging interest is just odd.


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## sidetone (Oct 2, 2021)

I know that Steve Jobs was behind replacing Flash. As I said HTML5 replaced Flash. People got fed up with Flash, and as I said used something better. So it was the people's frustrations with a bad product, and Apple which got it replaced. It made HTML5 more appealing to those who got fed up with Flash. Together, that got Flash out of mainstream.

You did claim it wasn't valid. And not in those words. Continually saying, I didn't ask how it was ported, is ignoring that aspect. You're treating it like it's not valid.

I said something COULD. As a lot of ports are by volunteers. And there's a lot of people submitting fixes and improvements to those maintainers. You're just sidestepping that you don't respect the volunteer's work. Whether or not they do a specific port, their work is STILL a fundamental for dependencies of any program you want to see ported.

Then, go ask them to port it, and get out of here, since the community effort means nothing in your opinion. This is a community forum, in case you haven't noticed.


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## Crivens (Oct 2, 2021)

you bickering lot will get threads binned, do you know that?


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

sidetone said:


> Who are you to boss people around? And that was classic shaming for your insipid argument, and you don't like getting called out on it.



I find it hilarious that the person who has post after post in two threads explaining that everything must be done his way complains about others asking to be left alone to do things their own way claiming they are bossing people around. Awesome!


sidetone said:


> You've never submitted a port.


Yup, and yet I have developed, participated in developing, organized groups to develop/fund the development of and funded many software systems that run on FreeBSD (some open source, some not). I guess there is another approach to getting software to run on this platform!


sidetone said:


> Who are you to disrespect the efforts of maintainers and submitters, by undermining and ignoring the work it takes for them that is needed for a port to be available? At least I respect and appreciate their work, unlike you.


Not once in any of these post have I said anything negative about those volunteers or paid staff who participate in any open source process. Wanting to start in a different place by gaging interest in a product and then trying to figure out what the best approach to get it to happen is not undermining anything. You do not "appreciate" anything, you worship some process and act as if it is the only way for anything to happen, all evidence to the contrary you just ignore.


sidetone said:


> I know more about it than someone who shows on on here and whines and doesn't appreciate the work of porters.


This is the part that I find so funny from you. You repeat over and over that I have demanded a port from people on here, and that I do not appreciate the work of people who do ports. You then proceeded to quote post after post of mine where I said I was not asking for anyone here to do anything other than to express interest in using a product and then claim those posts meant the opposite of the plain language they used.


sidetone said:


> That may not make me an expert, but you're less of one.



You know nothing about me, my level of knowledge, what I have done, or anything else about me, but feel free to pronounce away.


sidetone said:


> At least I've worked on building a port and made it run on my computer, and I don't come in here with your demanding attitude.


By demanding, you mean asking if people are interest in using something, and making it clear that is the extent of the current request? Got it. It does not take much to see that I registered for this forum in 2012. I guess it is possible that I did that and despite my posting a question about an actual system, it was all a sham so that almost 10 years later I could post things denigrating you. Maybe, during all those years, I never built a port, installed a package, _etc._, I guess it is certainly possible.


sidetone said:


> At least I don't sit here, and make keep forcing suggestions that something must absolutely be ported on FreeBSD, and make post after post after it aggressively.


Please quote a statement from me that says that something "must absolutely be ported on FreeBSD" or demanding that someone here do a port of something.  


sidetone said:


> Yeah, but classic denial, keep insisting you didn't do these things, because of your particular wording, while you're doing it.


You mean the wording that says repeatedly that I am not asking anyone here to do anything other than express interest in using something? Humpty Dumpty must be your hero, as you share his attitude about the meaning of words:



> 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.' ...


     - _Through the Looking Glass _by Lewis Carrol.

Everything that is said means exactly what you want it to mean, not matter the plain language used. You take very piece of evidence as support for your views (even those that directly contradict your position - like the existence of an early working version of Swift 5.5 for FreeBSD that was done completely outside your hallowed ports process and might never be made available through it). It must be nice to be able to think that way (might make standard conversation hard).


sidetone said:


> Plain and simple: you don't respect the process.



Nope. Plain and simple, my questions are much early in the process than the part about which you care, and no matter how many times you claim it, your statements about what I want or demand are just not true.


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## sidetone (Oct 2, 2021)

Ok, the volunteers work in ports means shit. Gotcha. You don't care about parts of the process, no matter what you say is more important.

Why are you here? Go ask Apple to port it. If you're such an expert, then port it. Or go convince Apple to port it by using your bossiness.

You want it ported, and the part you care about the end result, you don't care about that process. You're no expert on how something gets ported, because if you were, you would at least acknowledge that part.

You do boss people around. You think, just because you reform the way it's written, people don't see it.


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## zirias@ (Oct 2, 2021)

majortom said:


> However, while you keep claiming that the only approach for ports to happen is for the person interested in the product to do the work themselves, that is clearly an absurd position.


I never said that. If the software in question is any popular, just lean back and wait – sooner or later, someone who wants it will port it. But literally nobody will ever port something just because a bunch of people "demands" it. The only motivation in OSS is intrinsic (yes, that's even true for companies, although they might pay someone for possible future profit), deal with it.

Deliberately skipping the remaining blabber.


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## Beastie7 (Oct 2, 2021)

superriva said:


> Hello.
> 
> Maybe who can do Dart language port for FreeBSD? It will be very great.
> 
> Thank you in advance.



Use JavaScript.


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

sidetone said:


> Ok, the volunteers work in ports means shit. Gotcha. You don't care about parts of the process, no matter what you say is more important.


I will try one last time to see if it is possible for you to follow a simple thread of logic.

Someone says:

A long time ago there was an espresso machine in the break room. It broke and was taken away. I was thinking of talking to management about getting a new one, or maybe getting a group together to buy a replacement or possibly getting one of the espresso bean companies to give us one so we might be able to buy their beans. Are people here interested in having an espresso machine here.

In response, the next person says:

    There was a machine here but it broke and was taken away.

The originator says:

   Yes, I mentioned that in my question. Just wanted to know if people would be interested in having an espresso machine.

Two more people respond with:

    Having an espresso machine would not work, because one would also need a coffee roasting machine and a grinder and an espresso machine would not have those.

and:
    I hate espresso. I will never buy espresso.

The originator says, I guess there is not much interest, I will continue going to Starbucks.

Then you show up:
    You cannot talk about espresso without talking about communal coffee bean raising and roasting. That is the only way one can get espresso beans. Why are you demanding that we grow and roast beans. If you want espresso, you have grow and roast the beans yourself.

The originator says:
    There are lots of ways to get beans, and I was not expecting anyone here to grow or roast beans. Community bean growing and roasting might be a way of getting beans, but that is way further down the path than where I am starting.

I simply want to know if other people are interested in having an espresso machine.

This is followed by many more posts in which you keep saying that your approach is the only one and the originator should stop trying to force people to roast coffee beans for him.




sidetone said:


> Why are you here?


I will answer this in simplest way possible: I was responding to the original poster and suggesting that he might want to know if there was interest in this community in using the product, and if there was, there were lots of options for next steps from there.

If you are asking why I asked on a FreeBSD community forum if there was interest in the FreeBSD Community (represented here) in using Swift on FreeBSD? I will again give you the simplest answer possible:

I was interested in gaging interest in this community for having Swift 5.5 available on FreeBSD. It seemed that a great place to find FreeBSD users would be on a FreeBSD forum. Once one was able to quantify a level of interest in using the product many different approaches to getting a Swift 5.5 compiler and development environment would be possible. I have already detailed them, so I will not bother to do it again.



sidetone said:


> Go ask Apple to port it.


I have asked Apple to port it, and I was looking to find other people who are also FreeBSD users who might want to have the product, to make the same request. That would require almost no effort from people, and if there was enough interest generated, it would be a great start in getting such a port done.


sidetone said:


> If you're such an expert, then port it.


Even if I were going to do it myself (or pay for it to be done), I would not do it if I was the only one interested in it because that would mean that no other non-open source library would ever be made available for it.


sidetone said:


> Or go convince Apple to port it by using your bossiness.


You have the most bizarre view about what is "bossy".


sidetone said:


> You want it ported, and the part you care about the end result, you don't care about that process.


I want like to use Swift on FreeBSD, if there is not a large enough community of others who also want it, I would not want to waste time on it. Further, I do not care at all if it is in the FreeBSD ports tree, or if I have to download a pre-compiled binary from some other site. My interest is in having it available to use, not in the specific way one gets it. At the point I am clear as to how many others want to use it, I will see what the next step is that makes the most sense. That could be anything from finding a few others and funding it, to talking to people at Apple and pointing to the interest and encouraging them to do it.

I would not pre-judge anything, but I certainly would not start the process worrying about the community porting process here. Why waste any of anyone's energy on that if there is no interest.



sidetone said:


> You're no expert on how something gets ported, because if you were, you would at least acknowledge that part.


Acknowledge what?


sidetone said:


> You do boss people around. You think, just because you reform the way it's written, people don't see it. Get fucked.


Your maturity and charity know no bounds.


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## sidetone (Oct 2, 2021)

tldr

A bunch of bullshit claims, bullshit denials and gaslighting.

You simply disrespected a process, therefore, you deserve to be ignored by those who are a part of it. Rewrite and repaint it all you want, but you still disrespected and undermined it.


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## mark_j (Oct 2, 2021)

majortom said:


> Is there substantial interest for Dart in this part of the community? It would be great for people who are interested in using the product, to express interest here, so that people who might be able to help port (or the first party product owner themselves) can see there is interest. People have limited amount of time, so gauging interest is a great starting point.


Yes, overall your comment makes sense. Yes, people who are interested could show interest in the thread and things might happen from there.

I guess the real issue is no one  has since this thread started 4 years ago and reading the issue, it's obvious the upstream developers don't care to support FreeBSD (or any BSD or other systems), so a porter would have to really want to use this dart stuff and be constantly fighting upstream developers. That's probably why no one has stepped up.

I would say until upstream shows some interest in *BSD, Dart is not getting ported. (Hell, it's the first I've heard of it, then again I don't orbit the web-sphere)


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## majortom (Oct 2, 2021)

mark_j said:


> Yes, overall your comment makes sense. Yes, people who are interested could show interest in the thread and things might happen from there.


I did not notice that the thread was four years old. It popped up, I saw it and responded based on that. Dart does seem to be a bit more popular that before, but it does feel like many Google projects, it is super exciting to them right up until it is not. 


mark_j said:


> I would say until upstream shows some interest in *BSD, Dart is not getting ported. (Hell, it's the first I've heard of it, then again I don't orbit the web-sphere)


Certainly a reasonable response.


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## Crivens (Oct 3, 2021)

And that is a good place to end this discussion.


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