From the wrapper's point of view, there's no difference between character and non-character data, and the whole buffer can be modeled as a collection of indices mapping ranges of the document to different kinds of data.

One of those indices could be a rope (mapping document ranges to character data, for the document text). Other kinds of indices could also be used. The important thing is that all edits go through the wrapper so that all the relevant indices get updated.

  ```!dot
  (Markup)
  ```

Put that way, most of this post seems like a tautology: if you misuse the tools you are given, of course you're going to get bad results!

It seems reasonable to me that a language should make the assumption that the programmer's use case matches the languages strengths, so by default any runtime setup / bookkeeping / teardown code should run. Failure to remove that extra "complexity" isn't a failure of the toolchain, it's a failure of the programmer to select the right tool for the job.

If the point the author was trying to make was that the complexity being added is never useful, this is not a post that argues that position. A cost / benefit discussion of the specific behaviours being supported by that complexity would be very interesting!

If we're spending our time trying to sweep these issues under the rug, maybe there is.

And that makes me so angry.

Sure, maybe not everyone in the industry is an arsehole. But enough people are, and those people are vocal enough, that a significant number of people feel disgusted and threatened. That should be enough to tell you that even if the majority are lovely people, the industry as a whole still has a problem.

(also, for anyone wondering whether the number of people affected really is "significant", I would consider even one person to be a significant number)

I also get really angry at posts like "This has never happened to me, so I'm sure it's all ok". This may come as a surprise, but individual experiences are not universal. That something has never happened to you doesn't mean it's never happened to anyone else.

And if you're getting tired of seeing posts like this, don't complain about the people making the posts. Complain about the people harassing them. It may seem counterintuitive, but the fastest and most effective way to stop posts like this turning up is actually to make more of them, until the harassment and abuse stop.

"This happens all the time" is never a valid excuse.

Anyway, for all the developer convenience and technical merit systemd has, it doesn't support an open OS environment - it restricts freedom in favour of convenience, which is precisely the opposite of what many users prefer Linux for.