4 ms·
As far as I understood what I do about C, is that most of C's here called "quirks" have actually been enablers for much of the portability and performance of mo
by mar77i 8y ago
As far as I understood what I do about C, is that most of C's here called "quirks" have actually been enablers for much of the portability and performance of modern platforms. Therefore I don't like "undefined behavior" and the like being criticised for being such a "hindrance". I hence doubt the author's familiarity with C is much beyond the basics, which kind of makes the case for why the author also had to namedrop Spectre and Meltdown, which were caused by the fact that later optimizations were unsound, ie. the Tomasulo algorithm.
The problematic with the article somewhat remind me of the problems with LCTHW, and that the author of LCTHW was unable to figure out what the deal was about had been admitted by themselves. https://zedshaw.com/2015/01/04/admitting-defeat-on-kr-in-lcthw/ https://zedshaw.com/2015/01/04/admitting-defeat-on-kr-in-lct... Sorry to re-repost this article again. I just somewhat perceive two variants same "smells" in both.
- dikaiosune 8y agofrom the article: > David Chisnall is a researcher at the University of Cambridge, where he works on programming language design and implementation. He spent several years consulting in between finishing his Ph.D. and arriving at Cambridge, during which time he also wrote books on Xen and the Objective-C and Go programming languages, as well as numerous articles. He also contributes to the LLVM, Clang, FreeBSD, GNUstep, and Étoilé open-source projects, and he dances the Argentine tango. If tango experience isn't enough to make his opinion credible, I imagine being an LLVM and Clang contributor are pretty good qualifications.
- mar77i 8y agoI don't understand how someone who ended up working on a C compiler feels intimidated by the standard/-s such software needs to adhere to. And if such people work on a C compiler, we're not logically in for a ride of WTFs?