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I studied a lot of computer science in grad school, at world leading elite CS school, and I am a very successful developer myself and can give you sound advice

I studied a lot of computer science in grad school, at world leading elite CS school, and I am a very successful developer myself and can give you sound advice up and down the dev space and quibble your use of terminology. … I have no idea what a compiled language is.

fsckboy 1y ago
i don't know what it means to not know what a compiled language is
- skybrian 1y ago
  I believe they are saying that computer languages can be implemented by compilers and by interpreters, so "compiled" is technically a property of the implementation, not the language. But in casual use, "compiled language" means a language that is usually implemented using a compiler.
NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago
> I have no idea what a compiled language is. This sounds like any of a dozen different computer science university programs I am familiar with.
jiggawatts 1y ago
An interpreted language has a runtime that is essentially a function “i(script: string)” that immediately follows the instructions encoded in the string. A compiler is a function “c(script: string) -> byte[]” that instead of running the script, outputs a binary that does the same thing as the interpreter, but more efficiently. Commonly this means converting the human-readable script syntax to binary machine code that a CPU can run directly, but platforms like Java and .NET actually do this through multiple steps with an intermediate “byte code” that CPUs can’t execute without a lightweight runtime. The benefit of the JIT is that it makes the compiler code portable to other CPU architectures without having to ship the source code. It is simple enough that interpreting it is just a “while” loop that bumps a pointer, reads the next instruction bytes, and uses a giant switch table to decide what to do. If you squint at it, machine code is the same, except that the “loop and switch statement” is hard wired into the silicon.

fsckboy 1y ago

i don't know what it means to not know what a compiled language is

skybrian 1y ago
I believe they are saying that computer languages can be implemented by compilers and by interpreters, so "compiled" is technically a property of the implementation, not the language. But in casual use, "compiled language" means a language that is usually implemented using a compiler.

NoMoreNicksLeft 1y ago

> I have no idea what a compiled language is. This sounds like any of a dozen different computer science university programs I am familiar with.

jiggawatts 1y ago

An interpreted language has a runtime that is essentially a function “i(script: string)” that immediately follows the instructions encoded in the string. A compiler is a function “c(script: string) -> byte[]” that instead of running the script, outputs a binary that does the same thing as the interpreter, but more efficiently. Commonly this means converting the human-readable script syntax to binary machine code that a CPU can run directly, but platforms like Java and .NET actually do this through multiple steps with an intermediate “byte code” that CPUs can’t execute without a lightweight runtime. The benefit of the JIT is that it makes the compiler code portable to other CPU architectures without having to ship the source code. It is simple enough that interpreting it is just a “while” loop that bumps a pointer, reads the next instruction bytes, and uses a giant switch table to decide what to do. If you squint at it, machine code is the same, except that the “loop and switch statement” is hard wired into the silicon.