[HN Gopher] Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
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Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund Now Supporting FFmpeg
Author : vmbrasseur
Score : 127 points
Date : 2024-05-16 20:09 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
| bestouff wrote:
| Rewrite the damn thing in Rust. All these parsers in C, so widely
| used across so many projects make me very afraid.
| jacooper wrote:
| Just read the Twitter account of ffmpeg just to see what they
| thinks about this, spoiler alert: he doesn't like it to say the
| least.
| vigneshv_psg wrote:
| are you talking about a specific thread? if so, could you
| please link to it.
|
| i see some generic posts about how ffmpeg is written in C and
| Assembly and will not be re-written in C++, but nothing about
| Rust.
| troupo wrote:
| Rewrite for the sake of rewriting sounds like fun. How useful
| is it?
| nwah1 wrote:
| For an enormous project like this, it is probably more
| reasonable to just use the latest version of C, and turn on
| lots of linters and sanitizers. You could also use one of the
| various strict subsets of C that is oriented for safety.
|
| Might as well tell people to rewrite WebKit or Linux in Rust.
| There are projects that aim at building browsers or kernels in
| Rust, but the man-millennia of effort put into the existing
| projects means catching up is no small feat.
|
| Even the coreutils rewrite has taken like a decade and isn't
| done. And that is a small and well-defined goal by comparison.
| wffurr wrote:
| What other big projects like Chromium and Android are doing
| is writing new code in Rust and investing in interop with the
| existing C and C++ code, along with fuzzing and sanitizing.
| devwastaken wrote:
| You're not wrong. Media codecs are a good attack vector.
| However, it's not so simple. You need hand crafted SIMD to
| reach desired performance. That is a whole area of specialized
| theory and research. I think it should be done, but who is
| going to fund it?
| blipvert wrote:
| Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund?
|
| ;-)
| deciduously wrote:
| It would involve unsafe rust anyway, which does sequester but
| not eliminate the concern. I think it would be difficult to
| make a case that this effort is worthwhile.
| Scaevolus wrote:
| If your project is amenable to it, it's possible to wrap ffmpeg
| in a gvisor (runsc) docker container and _greatly_ reduce the
| risk.
| xnyan wrote:
| Serious question, let's say you had a ton of money and wanted
| to get this done, is there physically enough available Rust
| talent (at market rates) in the world today to port ffmpeg to
| rust in any reasonable amount of time? My understanding is that
| it's one of the biggest open source projects in terms of LoC,
| development hours needed to both create and maintain, and
| number of former and active developers working on the project.
| IshKebab wrote:
| There definitely is. You don't need support for all the
| obscure formats that ffmpeg supports.
|
| It would still cost a lot though.
| martinsnow wrote:
| Perhaps you don't need it. But that doesn't mean a lot of
| others find them very useful.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| There's plenty of talented developers out there that are
| currently working in another language, but could relatively
| quickly learn the required Rust skills to go work on such a
| project. Domain knowledge (codecs, video/audio processing,
| etc) is probably a bigger problem.
| aliher1911 wrote:
| It will possibly kill lots of community contributions.
| Currently its easy to add missing features to things like
| filters. Who is going to do that in rust? I'm yet to see a
| practicing rust programmer IRL.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I feel like using Wuffs would make more sense.
| Cyph0n wrote:
| I am a huge Rust fan, and also a huge FFmpeg fan.
|
| What exactly does a complete rewrite of FFmpeg achieve given
| the absolutely monstrous complexity involved?
| LtWorf wrote:
| More bugs, but none of them are double free?
| martinsnow wrote:
| What on earth would that accomplish?
| KetoManx64 wrote:
| Have you ever rewritten a project in a completely different
| language?
| Uehreka wrote:
| To be fair, ffmpeg is highly modular, some parts of it are
| probably already in Rust. I feel like rewriting certain
| extremely high-use libraries like libx264 could be done if
| like, 5 really productive Rust engineers with codec
| experience took it on for 12 months.
|
| I'm not saying it's needed, just that ffmpeg is the kind of
| thing that could be rewritten gradually if there was interest
| and a lot of dedicated talent.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Glad to hear this.
|
| ffmpeg is one of these "Too Important to Fail" libraries.
|
| I'll lay odds that billions of dollars rely on it, and it's an
| open-source tool.
| nisa wrote:
| It's very good that ffmpeg gets support and the sovereign tech
| fund is a good idea but for me it again just highlights how
| perverted the incentives to support open source are.
|
| Millions of dollars are extracted by using ffmpeg from a lot of
| corporations, yet the German taxpayer pays for maintenance.
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Finally my taxes are put to good use for once
| jallmann wrote:
| This is great news, but simultaneously disappointing that it is
| necessary. FFmpeg underpins tens of billions of dollars in value
| for the companies that use it, yet the support from the community
| is proportionally minuscule.
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