4 ms·

WoofWare.PawPrint, a Deterministic .NET Runtime

59 points by Smaug123 4mo ago

Smaug123 4mo ago
Something of a passion project. It's going to fail horribly if you try and use it, I'm sure, but it can already do some neat stuff!
- moron4hire 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - SeanAnderson 4mo ago
    because some software engineers enjoy shipping usable software more than writing the code needed to do so?
    - moron4hire 4mo ago
      What does that have to do with LLMs? There's morev to delivering value to the customer than just shipping code. We used to understand that technical debt was an existential risk to a project. I can't see how "code nobody understands" is not technical debt.
      - SeanAnderson 4mo ago
        I disagree. Shipping functionality that works and users consume is all that matters. Everything else is noise. Technical debt can be viewed through this lens - it reduces the rate in which functioning code is shipped. That's bad, but it's only one of many dials. The author states they feel that using LLMs allowed them to ship years faster. That's years of time in which they can collect feedback and iterate. They might even choose to scrap the entire project and rewrite it based on their learnings. The practicality of this is directly enabled by agentic coding.
        wolletd 4mo ago
        Technical debt is aptly named. From time to time it demands it's interest in the form of delaying a new feature, but as long as your overall technical revenue is positive, it's fine.
        jiggawatts 4mo ago
        It sort of isn’t though, because it gives the wrong impression to people who look at things through a financial lens. There’s no accrued compound interest: if you leave a piece of “indebted” software alone, you don’t pay any “interest”. Conversely, a small amount of tech debt can actually cost huge amount… but only if you make many changes at a high rate. That’s why I prefer the “worn tools” or “sand in the gears” analogies because they provide the right financial mental model. An unlubricated, worn out piece of industrial machinery costs you nothing… unless you try to make things with it. You can take this analogy quite far: sharp and lubricated but outdated machinery may work “just fine”, but you won’t be able to attract the top talent used to working with modern 5-axis CnC tools instead of having to manually turn cranks like a savage.
  - Smaug123 4mo ago
    To answer your question, although I would certainly have preferred you to phrase your comments less insultingly: this project would otherwise never have got to a state where it could find bugs. I am not paid to write this code, and it would have taken far more years than I would have been willing to spend. It's not actually unheard of for people to pay other entities to build their passion projects. For example, I visited [Eltham Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltham_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltham_Palace) last weekend, which was not in fact built entirely by the two Courthaulds who commissioned it.
    - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
      Don't feel bad, there's a lot of blind hatred. I too build some things I architected similarly, things that I know take companies many a buck and years to build.
moron4hire 4mo ago
[flagged]
- pjmlp 4mo ago
  Apparently the gRPC improvements to use shared memory when client and server are on the same, something common on network RPC not yet supported by gRPC, was done by Mark Russinovich, with agents. https://github.com/markrussinovich/shmem https://github.com/markrussinovich/shmem It is one example described on one of his AI talks at BUILD. If the PR gets accepted, here is your AI contribution to core technology.
- bri3d 4mo ago
  LLM rant aside, I think this comment is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what this is. This kind of runtime is an advanced debugging tool for exploring extreme edge cases in a repeatable way, not the thing you’d run your production apps on.
  - moron4hire 4mo ago
    I mean, if I'm in a situation in which I need more powerful debugging tools than what I already have available, then I kind of want to know those tools have been built with care. If I'm deep in the weeds of trying to deliver and I'm desperately reaching for something outside of the standard tool set, I'd like the person who made that tool to have crafted it in a dwarven forge under a pale moonlight. Not to have thrown to their hands and admit a tool with the intelligence of a smart working dog breed is smarter than them.
    - Smaug123 4mo ago
      I mean, there is a reason the MIT licence contains these words: > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND… INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF… FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE… If you would like a tool built with my organic artisanal human fingers, then I am certainly open to sufficiently large offers of money to build one for you! Alternatively, you can simply not use it if you think it won't fit your needs :)
LoganDark 4mo ago
This sounds like something a furry would name their project :)
- cryo32 4mo ago
  But it’s not Rust!
  - LoganDark 4mo ago
    Oh, there are furries all over tech — there are those who haven't discovered Rust yet, for instance...
  - Smaug123 4mo ago
    I didn't want to reimplement all the assembly-reading nonsense that comes for free with System.Reflection.Metadata. The `dotnetdll` crate exists but is GPL. Also in F# I can fall back to the CLR for fiddly things I don't want to implement (like the arithmetic opcodes on floats or whatever).

59 points by Smaug123 4mo ago

Something of a passion project. It's going to fail horribly if you try and use it, I'm sure, but it can already do some neat stuff!

moron4hire 4mo ago
[flagged]
- SeanAnderson 4mo ago
  because some software engineers enjoy shipping usable software more than writing the code needed to do so?
  - moron4hire 4mo ago
    What does that have to do with LLMs? There's morev to delivering value to the customer than just shipping code. We used to understand that technical debt was an existential risk to a project. I can't see how "code nobody understands" is not technical debt.
    - SeanAnderson 4mo ago
      I disagree. Shipping functionality that works and users consume is all that matters. Everything else is noise. Technical debt can be viewed through this lens - it reduces the rate in which functioning code is shipped. That's bad, but it's only one of many dials. The author states they feel that using LLMs allowed them to ship years faster. That's years of time in which they can collect feedback and iterate. They might even choose to scrap the entire project and rewrite it based on their learnings. The practicality of this is directly enabled by agentic coding.
      - wolletd 4mo ago
        Technical debt is aptly named. From time to time it demands it's interest in the form of delaying a new feature, but as long as your overall technical revenue is positive, it's fine.
        jiggawatts 4mo ago
        It sort of isn’t though, because it gives the wrong impression to people who look at things through a financial lens. There’s no accrued compound interest: if you leave a piece of “indebted” software alone, you don’t pay any “interest”. Conversely, a small amount of tech debt can actually cost huge amount… but only if you make many changes at a high rate. That’s why I prefer the “worn tools” or “sand in the gears” analogies because they provide the right financial mental model. An unlubricated, worn out piece of industrial machinery costs you nothing… unless you try to make things with it. You can take this analogy quite far: sharp and lubricated but outdated machinery may work “just fine”, but you won’t be able to attract the top talent used to working with modern 5-axis CnC tools instead of having to manually turn cranks like a savage.
- Smaug123 4mo ago
  To answer your question, although I would certainly have preferred you to phrase your comments less insultingly: this project would otherwise never have got to a state where it could find bugs. I am not paid to write this code, and it would have taken far more years than I would have been willing to spend. It's not actually unheard of for people to pay other entities to build their passion projects. For example, I visited [Eltham Palace](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltham_Palace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eltham_Palace) last weekend, which was not in fact built entirely by the two Courthaulds who commissioned it.
  - giancarlostoro 4mo ago
    Don't feel bad, there's a lot of blind hatred. I too build some things I architected similarly, things that I know take companies many a buck and years to build.

moron4hire 4mo ago

[flagged]

pjmlp 4mo ago
Apparently the gRPC improvements to use shared memory when client and server are on the same, something common on network RPC not yet supported by gRPC, was done by Mark Russinovich, with agents. https://github.com/markrussinovich/shmem https://github.com/markrussinovich/shmem It is one example described on one of his AI talks at BUILD. If the PR gets accepted, here is your AI contribution to core technology.
bri3d 4mo ago
LLM rant aside, I think this comment is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what this is. This kind of runtime is an advanced debugging tool for exploring extreme edge cases in a repeatable way, not the thing you’d run your production apps on.
- moron4hire 4mo ago
  I mean, if I'm in a situation in which I need more powerful debugging tools than what I already have available, then I kind of want to know those tools have been built with care. If I'm deep in the weeds of trying to deliver and I'm desperately reaching for something outside of the standard tool set, I'd like the person who made that tool to have crafted it in a dwarven forge under a pale moonlight. Not to have thrown to their hands and admit a tool with the intelligence of a smart working dog breed is smarter than them.
  - Smaug123 4mo ago
    I mean, there is a reason the MIT licence contains these words: > THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND… INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF… FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE… If you would like a tool built with my organic artisanal human fingers, then I am certainly open to sufficiently large offers of money to build one for you! Alternatively, you can simply not use it if you think it won't fit your needs :)

LoganDark 4mo ago

This sounds like something a furry would name their project :)

cryo32 4mo ago
But it’s not Rust!
- LoganDark 4mo ago
  Oh, there are furries all over tech — there are those who haven't discovered Rust yet, for instance...
- Smaug123 4mo ago
  I didn't want to reimplement all the assembly-reading nonsense that comes for free with System.Reflection.Metadata. The `dotnetdll` crate exists but is GPL. Also in F# I can fall back to the CLR for fiddly things I don't want to implement (like the arithmetic opcodes on floats or whatever).