search

ariya / ama

Ask me anything!
29 stars 1 forks source link

What are the three most underrated/overlooked open source projects? #20

Closed newworldorder closed 8 years ago

ariya commented 8 years ago

Free Pascal

Pascal is (still) an excellent choice to teach programming. Free Pascal (web site: freepascal.org) has been in the development, in various forms, for the last 20 years. There is no sign that it is going to stop anytime soon, the roadmap includes things such as LLVM target. This GPL-ed Pascal compiler, written in Pascal and compiled by itself, supports many different systems, from 16-bit DOS to the latest iOS running 64-bit ARM CPU. With the companion projects such as the full-featured Lazarus and a rich visual component library, the Free Pascal ecosystem offers a one-stopping solution for everything from a coding tutorial for kids to a professional Windows application.

Apache Traffic Server

The origin of Apache Traffic Server (web site: trafficserver.apache.org) can be traced back to the early days of Inktomi. Being battle-hardened by processing the web traffic at the scale of Yahoo! (who acquired Inktomi), ATS enjoys a superb reputation as a high-performance, versatile caching proxy (forward and reverse). Donated to Apache Foundation by Yahoo!, ATS is open-source and developed in the open. Specification compliant? Of course. Security features? You bet, ATS is ahead of the pack.

Fossil

My shortest characterization of Fossil, (web site: fossil-scm.org), is usually very easy: Git on steroid. Not only you have the entire code repository and its history, you can also carry the issue tracker and the wiki pages whereever you go. Forget about .git directory, everything is packed in a single file (with built-in integrity self-check) and therefore sync-ing with Google Drive/Dropbox/Box/ownCloud is trivial. Actively developed in the last 10 years, you could enjoy everything that it offers in a self-contained executable (with near-zero dependencies) weighing less than today's average web page. Make no mistake: despite its killer features, Fossil is blazing fast.

newworldorder commented 8 years ago

Nice...looks like I have some homework to do on these projects--thanks!