7 ms·

Is this a joke? Do you really think managed pointers are an example of authoritarian dystopianism?

by wyager 5y ago

greesil 5y ago
unique_ptr is a conspiracy, man. You see, the people who make money off of mallocs (those corrupt DRAM manufacturers) want it to stay that way. Just follow the money.
aksss 5y ago
Thread safety is like bicycle helmet laws, discuss..
- beached_whale 5y ago
  One would, but without a barrier the head hit before slowing waiting for the group the ground to get out of the critical section :)
- cjfd 5y ago
  Well, kind of. I would argue that most code does not need to be thread safe because it is not intended to run in a multi-threaded environment. I once worked on a application where it was 'standard' to run everything in a thread pool so basically everything could run simultaneous to everything else. Problem was that there also was lots of state to manage. So then one ends up giving every class one or more locks. Also, this particular application was not the high-performance part of the application. Obvious solution is to run most of the application in a single thread message loop and get rid of all of the locks. This appears to be heresy nowadays though. The high profile C++-ers tell us that everything has to be thread safe.
  - Jweb_Guru 5y ago
    > Well, kind of. I would argue that most code does not need to be thread safe because it is not intended to run in a multi-threaded environment. In that case you are actually thread safe, though! Just use a language that lets you specify which data can't be sent across threads (Rust isn't the only example, Erlang enforces this entirely dynamically) and use thread locals instead of statics (in a single threaded environment they're effectively the same thing), and tada, you have thread safety that continues to work even if people decide to run your stuff on many different cores.
Santosh83 5y ago
He is talking (I believe) about the general trend of nudging, cajoling more and more coders into using managed, very high level, safe languages and runtimes, and in general discouraging peeking under the hood, at the hardware level, as something raw, wild or unsafe. Yes you can still do it on a RPi, but perhaps in another decade or so, you might not be allowed to program in 'unsafe' languages on all other mainstream platforms, unless you register for a driver/system developer license or something, or not even that. The tinkerer/hacker ethos is disappearing slowly from PCs. It never caught on in the mobile world. It may perhaps only survive as a remnant in specialised chips and boards designed for learning.
- jolux 5y ago
  > the general trend of nudging, cajoling more and more coders into using managed, very high level, safe languages and runtimes This is a good thing: these languages and runtimes are indeed much safer, and also much more productive than C. You can even still get the same amount of low-level control with Rust. > in general discouraging peeking under the hood, at the hardware level, as something raw, wild or unsafe. C is unsafe though. Decades of experience writing software has shown us that even expert C programmers write memory bugs with regularity. > Yes you can still do it on a RPi Or any other PC really. > but perhaps in another decade or so, you might not be allowed to program in 'unsafe' languages on all other mainstream platforms, unless you register for a driver/system developer license or something, or not even that. Lunacy. What is the evidence for this? > The tinkerer/hacker ethos is disappearing slowly from PCs. It was only ever there in the first place with a tiny minority of users, and that minority seems as committed to their craft as they've ever been.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Lunacy. What is the evidence for this? Look at all the locked-down walled-garden platforms proliferating, and this famously prescient story: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html 20 years ago, many people thought RMS was a completely insane lunatic. Yet now he seems more like a prophet. It's not hard to see where things are going if you read between the lines. Increasingly, "safety and security" is being used to exert control over the population and destroy freedom. Letting your children play outside unsupervised is "unsafe". Non-self-driving cars are "unsafe". Eating certain food is "unsafe". Having a rooted mobile device is "unsafe". Not using an approved browser by a company that starts with G is "unsafe". ... Programming in C is "unsafe". "Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."

Is this a joke? Do you really think managed pointers are an example of authoritarian dystopianism?

by wyager 5y ago

Is this a joke? Do you really think managed pointers are an example of authoritarian dystopianism?

unique_ptr is a conspiracy, man. You see, the people who make money off of mallocs (those corrupt DRAM manufacturers) want it to stay that way. Just follow the money.

aksss 5y ago

Thread safety is like bicycle helmet laws, discuss..

beached_whale 5y ago
One would, but without a barrier the head hit before slowing waiting for the group the ground to get out of the critical section :)
cjfd 5y ago
Well, kind of. I would argue that most code does not need to be thread safe because it is not intended to run in a multi-threaded environment. I once worked on a application where it was 'standard' to run everything in a thread pool so basically everything could run simultaneous to everything else. Problem was that there also was lots of state to manage. So then one ends up giving every class one or more locks. Also, this particular application was not the high-performance part of the application. Obvious solution is to run most of the application in a single thread message loop and get rid of all of the locks. This appears to be heresy nowadays though. The high profile C++-ers tell us that everything has to be thread safe.
- Jweb_Guru 5y ago
  > Well, kind of. I would argue that most code does not need to be thread safe because it is not intended to run in a multi-threaded environment. In that case you are actually thread safe, though! Just use a language that lets you specify which data can't be sent across threads (Rust isn't the only example, Erlang enforces this entirely dynamically) and use thread locals instead of statics (in a single threaded environment they're effectively the same thing), and tada, you have thread safety that continues to work even if people decide to run your stuff on many different cores.

Santosh83 5y ago

He is talking (I believe) about the general trend of nudging, cajoling more and more coders into using managed, very high level, safe languages and runtimes, and in general discouraging peeking under the hood, at the hardware level, as something raw, wild or unsafe. Yes you can still do it on a RPi, but perhaps in another decade or so, you might not be allowed to program in 'unsafe' languages on all other mainstream platforms, unless you register for a driver/system developer license or something, or not even that. The tinkerer/hacker ethos is disappearing slowly from PCs. It never caught on in the mobile world. It may perhaps only survive as a remnant in specialised chips and boards designed for learning.

jolux 5y ago
> the general trend of nudging, cajoling more and more coders into using managed, very high level, safe languages and runtimes This is a good thing: these languages and runtimes are indeed much safer, and also much more productive than C. You can even still get the same amount of low-level control with Rust. > in general discouraging peeking under the hood, at the hardware level, as something raw, wild or unsafe. C is unsafe though. Decades of experience writing software has shown us that even expert C programmers write memory bugs with regularity. > Yes you can still do it on a RPi Or any other PC really. > but perhaps in another decade or so, you might not be allowed to program in 'unsafe' languages on all other mainstream platforms, unless you register for a driver/system developer license or something, or not even that. Lunacy. What is the evidence for this? > The tinkerer/hacker ethos is disappearing slowly from PCs. It was only ever there in the first place with a tiny minority of users, and that minority seems as committed to their craft as they've ever been.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Lunacy. What is the evidence for this? Look at all the locked-down walled-garden platforms proliferating, and this famously prescient story: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html 20 years ago, many people thought RMS was a completely insane lunatic. Yet now he seems more like a prophet. It's not hard to see where things are going if you read between the lines. Increasingly, "safety and security" is being used to exert control over the population and destroy freedom. Letting your children play outside unsupervised is "unsafe". Non-self-driving cars are "unsafe". Eating certain food is "unsafe". Having a rooted mobile device is "unsafe". Not using an approved browser by a company that starts with G is "unsafe". ... Programming in C is "unsafe". "Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes."