The Finns fought on the "bad" side as well, due to the Soviet Union having tried to invade them already two years previously. Ukraine had likewise tried to get independence in 1917 which led to a 4 year civil war which they unfortunately lost.

> The phrase was popularised during the Ukrainian War of Independence (from 1917 to 1921).

Bandera remains a highly controversial figure in Ukraine.[9] Many Ukrainians hail him as a role model hero,[10][11] or as a martyred liberation fighter,[12] while other Ukrainians, particularly in the south and east, condemn him as a fascist,[13] or Nazi collaborator,[10] whose followers, called Banderites, were responsible for massacres of Polish and Jewish civilians during World War II.[14][15] On 22 January 2010, Viktor Yushchenko, the then president of Ukraine, awarded Bandera the posthumous title of Hero of Ukraine, which was widely condemned. The award was subsequently annulled in 2011 given that Stepan Bandera was never a Ukrainian citizen.[16] Bandera gained further prominence following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.[17][18][19]

"Bandera's favorability appeared to shoot up rapidly, with 74% of Ukrainians viewing him favorably according to an April 2022 poll from a Ukrainian research organization."

It is an argument in bad faith to cite him as a marker of support for 'neo-nazism' in Ukraine, doubly so during time when adversary is coming and is very open about stripping you of your national identity, language and history.

And about Asow - what I can say for certain is, that we have some very hardcore Neonazis here in town - and they are literally friends and strongly connected with the Azow people - that's kind of all I have to know about them. But I do know more - and it is not good. Those guys aren't fighting for democracy.

Regarding Azov, I am native Russian speaker with many friends from Ukraine, there are legitimately orgs/groups that you can call out for being open nazis, but if all you can do is comment on Azov in 2023 then you are simply delusional or misled by Russian propaganda, I'm sorry.

I was comparing the line of argument.

"but if all you can do is comment on Azov in 2023"

And I can and did a bit more, but there is probably no point in further debating it.

This is a lie

The very Wikipedia you linked

> Bandera remains a highly controversial figure in Ukraine.

And once Azov got integrated into the army it shed its neonazi members.

This is how propaganda works: take a kernel of truth and spin a whole tapestry of lies out of it

People are not cardboard cutouts. We do not boycott Ford cards because Henry Ford was a nazi sympathizer. We can condemn that and yet recognize him as an industralist who changed society.

No matter how controversial Bandera’s ties to nazis were, I am almost certain that his recent rise in popularity is motivated primarily by the pro-ukrainian national identity part and not the pro-nazi part. Enemy of my enemy can be a useful ally at the moment, and all.

Not any more than US or Russia itself

Azov on the other hand is not a "Nazi regiment", it's had troubling beginnings but it was cleared up as it was brought into army ranks.

EDIT: misread the question, in US there aren't 'regiments', but denying the fact that army is rife with supremacists is plain silly.

[Any] Army by itself is a magnet for these sorts of folks, and it takes active effort to weed them out, not something that a country at war can easily afford.

It isn't, and never was.

There were a few people there who flirted with neo nazism back in 2014. They were rooted out swiftly. There is a reason why every time you ask Russians for proof that Azov is Nazi they show the same old and / or manipulated photos.

Today Azov has representatives of most minorities in Ukraine, including "ethnic Russians" and Jews.

Meanwhile, one of the founders of Task Force Rusisch said something along this in an interview (IIRC and I don't speak Russian natively):

> Let's not mince words, I am not a "nationalist", I am a nazi.

This is extremely misleading (and I personally would argue wrong, but I assume good faith on your side) given that Ukrainian support for neo nazism is comparable to countries in western Europe, while russia who attack them is has a lot more neo-nazis, both in absolute numbers but also by percentage.

As for the Azov regiment, here is what wikipedia writes (emphasis mine):

> and allegedly continuing association with far-right groups and neo-Nazi ideology,

Anyone who has followed the war in Ukraine can tell you that Jews and other minorities are heavily represented in modern Azov, including high profile members, which makes accusations about Azov being nazies somewhat ridiculous.

Again, I assume good faith on your side, but please be careful so you don't spread Russian "Z" narratives. It is incredibly damaging.

How do you see alternative options?

I don't see "okay guys, let's wrap it up" as a thing invaders will accept. It will also mean "you will never return home" or "your family is under occupational regime right now, good luck" for a lot of locals, and that's unlikely this option will be accepted by them.

I think some context may help. Russian government media clearly wrote that Ukrainians should be eradicated as the idea with language forbidden (they say it's "Russian spoiled by Polish" and civilians "suffering the hardships of occupation for the support of nazi regime (with further clarification that everyone is a supporter)". I'm not paraphrasing or exaggerating. I'm almost quoting.

So it's not like they plan to stop on "already captured territories". It would be more of a delay before the next round, like the past few years long ceasefire before 2022. This way the question gets reduced to "at what rate do you want to see your country being dismantled?".

> EU should really put more cash on table to help UA.

More high-tech weaponry like rockets, drones and other stuff will lead to lesser Ukrainian casualties with bigger territorial gains, so that's a better option compared to the current state of things.

Large scale wars usually go on until one of the sides can't continue anymore. Ukrainian government don't have plans to stop anytime soon and surrender may shatter the rest of the country in multiple ways, effectively ending somewhat normal functioning for years or decades to come. Also, military draft goes on and enlisted soldiers will go to battle. So it would be nice and wise to give them some technological advantage.

> People talk lightly about the lives of others when its not theirs on the line

Also, people talk lightly about giving up territory when it's not the territory with their homes on the line.

They would not stop undermining the independence of Ukraine, and would in fact be emboldened to do more. There would be no "peace", there'd be hybrid warfare incursions constantly, they'd start crowing about Russian language rights even more, and use it as a justification for meddling probably at an even more intense level than before. Every election would be undermined, people assassinated, bought off, manipulated.

Remember Russia last year changed its constitution to include Ukrainian land in its borders. Lands which it currently doesn't even occupy.

They have spent the last 10 years selling their population on the line that Ukrainians were doing some sort of genocide on the population in the Donbas -- so just imagine if Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts were split in two, as they are now?

Official Russian ideology is Russo-supremacist, with an Orthodox Christian nationalist veneer. This is not the USSR era, with its "brotherhood of peoples" propaganda. Its right wing nationalist, and imperialist on that basis, and has shown itself willing to attempt to enforce this.

Eventually they'd either get their way and turn Ukraine back into a client state, or invade again.

Russia needs to be pushed back, its defense lines broken and its trade relationships properly severed, its energy exports denied access to the west until a substantial foreign policy shift is made by its leadership.

Oh, and removed from the UN security council or the security council just abolished.

Russia is still attacking, still trying to conquer more land. It's going incredibly slowly and at tremendous cost in Russian lives, but with less resources for the defender, it wouldn't go away; it would go faster.

The only way to end this is to make clear to Russia that they cannot win this. And for that, Ukraine needs a lot more support.

If you think that after retreat from Ukraine Russian will use nukes - you are consuming too much Russian propaganda.

Not to mention Russian civilians are downwind from Ukraine anyways. Radiation fallout would poison the entire region.

Even the use of a "tactical" nuke or chemical weapons would be a red line that NATO would treat as an escalation that would end with the complete elimination of Russian defensive lines from the air and the end of Russian air supremacy in eastern Ukraine, and I'm sure Biden has communicated this very clearly to Putin behind the scenes.

Russia is treading a strategically thin line. Unless Trump gets back in the Whitehouse.

And funny to see you put "freedom of speech" in quotes, while you post in a completely public forum without sanction. Shoot your mouth off wrong in Russia and you'll end up in a jail cell. It sounds more like your problem is that you expect people to just ... agree with you? But the problem is you're wrong.

Behind Ukraine is a giant contiguous geographic area of allies with supplies and armaments superior to Russia's, and an economic & industrial capacity many multiples of it. What is required, is will from leadership and a population that doesn't fall for Russian propaganda, like you have.

Your privilege is showing -- or are you just used to being agreed with and getting your way?

As for the cost -- the expense is human lives and untold misery. Which is the unacceptable cost of every war. Which is why bullies use it as a tool, in hopes that their foe will submit because the cost is unbearable.

It's brutally unpalatable and inhumane to continue with war. But the alternative is worse.

BTW last week Putin made it clear that no "peace" at the current borders will be permitted and that their original goals remain, which is (at a minimum) the merge into Russia of all the Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson oblasts, the elimination of the gov't in Ukraine (and presumably its replacement with a puppet regime), and no EU membership and certainly no NATO protection.

So basically 1/2 the territory of Ukraine, including its most productive agricultural and industrial lands, the bulk of its Black Sea coastline, and it become a client state.

That's peace?

Last few years they receive some ammo, but just enough to not loose the battle. And sanctions are a joke. Russians are easily selling goods to EU, money easily flowing to Russia. There are backdoors for each sanctions.

Don't see how it is in EU interest? If Russia will occupy Ukraine then they could invade EU states next. Estonia for example. There are already threats coming from Russian state TV. They are ready for war. And they don't care who to invade and kill: Nazi in Ukraine, Nazi in Estonia, Nazi in Poland etc. Call any nation a Nazi and there will be legions of Russian soldiers who are ready to kill everyone (including children and elderly people, they will rape, torture and kill everyone) for promise to get paid few thousand euros per months.

If Russia attacks the EU or NATO, then we’ll need our weapons to fight them. I think there is ZERO chance that they do that. As NATO is just simply more powerful and Russia is not stupid. It would be called the 3rd WW.

Doesn't sound "all the ammo in the world" for me.

Yes, they received a lot of close range defensive weapons, but almost nothing offensive.

Regarding invasion to one country in NATO - why not? Other armies are extremely weak, with ammo depots for few weeks of active operation. And everybody are terrified to do any offensive because "crazy Russians have nukes and we need their oil and natural gas"

Likely if the west provided jets, this would change drastically.

I actually agree Russia is not stupid enough to engage in a direct attack on a NATO nation. They would likely move next against in Transnistria, Georgia, etc. And I don't see what would stop them, if they have success in Ukraine.

But they will engage in hybrid warfare against the west (already were), and they will be twice as emboldened if they are given Ukraine.

This is a country that felt free to unleash radioactive poisons against persons on UK soil, shoot down a civilian airliner, etc. Why do you want to appease them?

There are airports, ammo depots and other facilities less than 100 km from Ukrainian cities, and Russians are safe(mostly) there.

While at the same time Russians every day continuing their terrorist attacks on Ukrainian cities.

Russia is a terrorist state, but world doesn't care if they can have profits from Russia.

But after this summer of letting the Ukrainians flounder along the front in a stalemated counteroffensive, I am frustrated. The F16s should have been there this summer.

And now Avdiivka will become this winter's Bakhmut and the US could very well end up with a Putin-allied Trumpler in the Whitehouse next year.

Unfortunately for Ukraine, there is no powerful politician like Reagan nowadays.

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.

We had decades of peace and prosperity and now hard times are coming.

If you think that west should give up and let Russians win and keep occupied territories - you should learn European history better.

Remember "peace for out time" agreement with Hitler in Munich 1938?

Every time you hand something to aggressors you need to hand them more the next time.

How many km between russia and the border of the country where you live?

For me it's 0.

You either help Ukraine now or be ready to fight yourself sometime in the future.

It's like in the winter you are cold and you pee in your pants. It will be warm for a moment end then what?

Not only that, you publicly advocate for not helping Ukraine and condemning tens of millions of people to horrors is russian oppression.

So you are doing kremlins work exactly as they wish for.

You seem to understand that should we not help Ukraine then they will not stop. They still have nukes to keep scaring you.

What is your strategy?

The mistake the west made was not having confidence in the Ukrainians early on, and not supplying them with the tools early on and into last winter. We let Russia pull back and build intensive defensive lines that would be impossible to breach without air support.

As for nuclear weapons... they are not tools to win wars.

The first country to use a nuclear weapon as an offensive weapon will be turned to glass. It's just not a tool that even Putin is stupid enough to use.

They don't make you a powerful offensive power, just a powerful defensive one. And nobody has ever suggested invading Russia, despite their paranoid claims to the contrary.

That sounds like you want to decide for Ukraine whether it should fight on or not. That's not your place to decide.

And if you're from Europe, you should know from history that appeasement does not actually bring you "peace in our time".

To be fair, I/O is a place where C++ really dropped the ball, too. The part of the C++ library is unfortunately a complete mess. This is not really a “win” for C++ as much as it is a failure for both languages.

I think it is hard to advocate for either C or C++, for greenfield projects, these days.

But yes, in a world where Rust exists, I don't see a need for C or C++ for greenfield.

In many cases you can just interface to the C libraries. But cross language coding has never been perfect, and yes, sometimes it's better to continue using the same language.

It's not hard to write an RAII wrapper around a C library, and the careful allocate/free is code you have to write either way (e.g. I'd write a wrapper in C++ if I need to use a C library with resource handling).

C is the easiest to interface with. Every language has to be C-compatible.

I would not choose C or C++ just because I depend on libfftw, or simdjson, or most other things. If the code that needs to talk to the library is less than 10% of the total program (exact percentage just made up), then I'd still use Rust.

Rust while much safer, also needs care if any crate makes use of unsafe, even in pure Rust.

https://thesquareplanet.com/blog/the-story-of-a-rust-bug/

Yes it is in the libc bindings, but the logic error is on Rust side.

It depends on the company, the team skills, the tools they are used to have, the difference when moving into Rust, eg CUDA in C++ with NSight and Visual Studio plugins from NVidia, versus Rust.

But as for team knowledge of C++, that's temporary. In the long run, because of the avoidance of many bugs, it may save time.

But there are also no silver bullets.

IMO a parser should be reading the entire file, and then parsing as a block of memory, by default, for most use cases these days. That way you don’t have to think about IO while you are parsing. Streaming parsers are niche these days for good reasons.

I usually put all the resource freeing at the end of a function under a goto label, or only a few lines within the allocation, so it's easy to visually confirm everything is cleaned up. The way this commit frees the resources inside of if blocks is not how I would have done it. And if I find I let a leak in the code I usually refactor to make the correctness more obvious.

In this example, the fact that m3_ParseModule takes ownership of the wasm pointer is very tricky. It looks like there is still a leak but there is not.

Yes and no.

It's easy to not make a mistake in a function. It's basically impossible to not make this mistake in 1'000 functions.

Especially as code evolves over time, being 99% perfect about this, or even 99.9% perfect, is just not good enough. Not nearly enough.

And this reminds me of something Schneier said, that everyone can make a cryptographic algorithm that they themselves cannot break. That even as a professional, having your algorithm broken is not even embarrassing.

Similarly, very good coders are not even embarrassed when they fail at memory management. People may be better or worse at it, but even the best of us are terrible at it.

I once knew a very good coder who bragged about how apparently he's the only one able to write code that's not buggy like this.

To prove a point, I spent an hour reading his opensource project and found several resource leaks, at least one of which was remotely triggerable.

It's easy to do it right once, usually, but no these mistakes happen all the time.

> if I find [… typo words(?) omitted … ] a leak in the code I usually refactor to make the correctness more obvious.

This seems to contradict that it was easy to avoid in the first place. Yes, refactor can help. But there's a bit of learned helplessness, in that this is actually the language's fault, and it doesn't have to be that way.

  > To prove a point, I spent an hour reading his opensource project
  > and found several resource leaks

  > > if I find [… typo words(?) omitted … ] a leak in the code I
  > > usually refactor to make the correctness more obvious.

There are non-language mechanisms that help code run safely, like Wasm, which is a sandbox. Also msan and asan should be used more.

Thinking that changing the language is the right way to fix all the problems you mentioned still seems like a premature assumption. The fact that 100% perfection is worth pursuing at all costs is theoretical and you could be losing things more valuable in the process - e.g. FFI bindings suck, and the added fragmentation in having so many languages in the craft is a pernicious cost with a multitude of aspects to it.

There are non language ways to make things safer, sure. Take C++, one can do things other than RAII to avoid resource leaks, and it'll be a good pattern. But RAII is right there.

In C++ one can be disciplined about object ownership. But I find that in Rust "doing the right thing" is not optional.

Static and strong typing have similar virtues.

You can write fine software in assembly. Steve Gibson apparently does.

I'm not saying there are any silver bullets. I do appreciate that five minutes spent now being forced to think about object ownership, can save a six month project down the line refactoring to remove all shared_ptrs.

Not accidentally creating copies, because RVO has many conditionals on when it happens.

No silver bullets. But in my opinion C is always worse than at least a C++ subset deliberately chosen. Plain C is because you enjoy the journey, not because you'll get there faster or better.

In C++ you can refactor to RAII encapsulate, when a resource is leaked. In C you can't.

  > To prove a point, I spent an hour reading his opensource project
  > and found several resource leaks

Doesn't hurt to ask, though. :-)

I don't think it's that far outside of the core language philosophy. Though it would take years for it to make it through to all toolchains and actually be adopted.

Arguably a compromise would be that you still have to write the resource-freeing calls explicitly, but the compiler would verify that you didn’t forget them. On the other hand, that’s what linters could already do.

(1) https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2895.htm