I gave a look on list of plenty gemini software yesterday. First impression was "Gemini is so simple protocol, it will be ported to everything. And it is clear confidence". But later I realized that the most of code is in Python, Go and Rust. There are no Pascal, may be only one plain C project. There are no clients for AROS, Kolibri, FreeDOS. And gemini even not mentioned on their forums. Luckly, I have two (ported) clients in Haiku. Conclusion? Gemini producted by (our) new generation of smoothie drinkers. Here we relax, play and learn programming. Even gemini itself is ideal for obscure platforms and more suitable for the old systems than common http, it would not appear there immediately.
2 years ago
opinions vary. a lot. while i think that some of the old tech have its uses, even the really old programming languages like LISP have received modern compilers/interpreters. taking something modern and artificially moving it to an old system is hard. taking an old compiler and running it on a modern system is hard too. imho this just shows who dwells on gemini. creators, writers, bloggers and whole lot of linux people. if gemini was of interest to freedos people, someone would port tls that knows the system well enough. it's a matter of motivation i guess, and i am good in minimal linux distos ;) 路 2 years ago
@marginalia Ideally the continued simplicity of the protocol and standards involved will mean that actually being able to compile a client from source or write your own will continue being easy enough that the whole "running a binary blob containing millions of lines of inscrutable code from a large, easily targeted entity that everyone is essentially forced to rely on" scenario doesn't happen here. 路 2 years ago
I'm hoping to see gemini on embedded systems like the ESP32. Imagine that: a $3 server! (The gemini of things??)
Definitely possible, but my knowledge of TLS is currently zero. 路 2 years ago
Indeed, TLS is probably the bigger obstacle and also my biggest gripe with Gemini and the whole encrypt-everything ethos that's going around; it's not that MITM is the be-all-end-all of security threats, encrypting all your traffic makes you much more susceptible to untrustworthy clients. You can't tell what they are sending, and thanks to CDNs, you can't tell where either. In a wider sense, it's much easier for a government to to say lean on google or mozilla and have them spy from within your computer than it is to listen to all internet traffic and get much useful out of that. 路 2 years ago
@reidrac Completely agree and understand. However, on any weird system you will probably need TLS anyway (for email, for bloatnet). Not sure about Python, which moves fast and may be unreachable goal for few developers to maintain. 路 2 years ago