cfallin

24 ms·

181.
by cfallin 10y ago
That signifies a macro. It's meant to visually distinguish macros from ordinary function calls because macros may have arbitrary semantics (they can expand into any code at all). The stdlib defines `println` as a macro because it allow
182.
by cfallin 10y ago
Concurrency implies multiple partial computations in progress, but not necessarily that they run at the same time -- some models (e.g. a single-threaded event loop, like Node's) explicitly guarantee mutual exclusion and define certain
183.
by cfallin 10y ago
This seems a bit... inflexible. I definitely understand the arguments for not breaking builds and for reducing administrative overhead and such, but not every bit of secret data can be revoked like a key/credential can. What if you acc
184.
by cfallin 10y ago
As a kid in that region (Portland, OR), we practiced earthquake drills in school and such, and we had a few smaller ones (I remember at least 1996 and 2001), so people who've been there long enough are at least aware of the possibility
185.
by cfallin 10y ago
At least at some schools, a spike at 2 years or so can also come from "mastering out". In my PhD program we get an MS after completing the required classes just by filing a form (and I think this is common). Someone who figures ou
186.
by cfallin 10y ago
The core of systemd revolves around units, but the "systemd ecosystem" has expanded to logging (journalctl), bus management, a new way to set the hostname (hostnamectl), a login manager, fstab parsing and disk management, a new se
187.
by cfallin 10y ago
The buggy-whip analogy is interesting and applicable from a certain viewpoint ("big core" thinking in a low-power market) but I'm not sure it fully works: mobile chips are fundamentally converging toward desktop chips microar
188.
by cfallin 10y ago
Atom isn't crippled so much as it's developed from a very simple (small, low-power, in-order execution) baseline and so hasn't had the time to reach the level of performance maturity and sophistication that the "big core
189.
by cfallin 10y ago
The thing is that the kernel, while large, has one defined purpose -- to provide abstractions of hardware resources and arbitrate those resources between programs -- and thus conceptual simplicity, even if the source tree is huge. The POS
190.
by cfallin 10y ago
I was about to reply to you but now that you reminded me of Wikipedia... oh goodness, OK, this can wait :-) Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/214/
191.
by cfallin 10y ago
It's a fine-grained (green) threading runtime and language extension. Here's one of the original papers on Cilk: [1]. The programming model is completely independent of, and orthogonal to, whatever microarchitecture the pipeline h
192.
by cfallin 10y ago
> At the 1wk+ territory, it will start to look something like Katrina ... This reminds me of a blog that was live-updated during Katrina by a data center operator: [1]. They managed to keep everything running through the whole storm, IIR
193.
by cfallin 11y ago
The initial install is certainly that way -- the install media drops you to a command line and you get to partition/format disks, write network config files, etc., yourself -- but once it's running, things are very smooth. Everyth
194.
by cfallin 11y ago
No doubt, Hillsboro is not for the young and hip, nor anyone with a possible allergy to suburban un-culture or parking-lot-sprawl. A number of my coworkers commuted from downtown or the eastside (and MAX light-rail makes that pretty easy, m
195.
by cfallin 11y ago
That's true... but I think it just depends on the market. I lived one year each in Mountain View and in Hillsboro, OR (a Portland suburb near Intel's campus), and while Mountain View was competitive, Hillsboro had oodles of nice,
196.
by cfallin 11y ago
I'm a PhD student at CMU right now. We just went from 75-degree "wow, we skipped spring" weather a few weekends ago to snow last weekend. Who knows what next week will bring. Keeps things interesting as long as you remain ind
197.
by cfallin 11y ago
Pittsburgh has a lot going for it, and it's been really cool seeing the growth since I moved to Pgh in 2009. I think the one thing it might have against it is a growing anti-gentrification/tech movement. It's nothing like thr
198.
by cfallin 11y ago
Yes please! I grew up in PDX, and live in Pgh now. There are a surprising number of similarities in the sort of grassroots neighborhood community, and the slower pace of life compared to CA. (And the weather, I guess.) Pittsburgh is way ahe
199.
by cfallin 11y ago
> a provider of remote computing services to the public shall ensure such products are capable of complying with a court order to decrypt. I'm not well-versed in these things at all, but I wonder what implications this would have on
200.
by cfallin 11y ago
I've recently been using Rust to write a small instrumentation runtime for a project that I would normally have written in C++. The FFI is surprisingly easy and I really love that I can compile down to libfoo.a with no other Rust runti
201.
by cfallin 11y ago
It's fascinating to me that you mention Pittsburgh lefts as a sign of altruism / global-outcome-optimization. I currently live in Pittsburgh and... let's just say that I would not hold the average driver up as a model of self
202.
by cfallin 11y ago
> The proof of this is that several core concepts that are considered "safe" have "unsafe" portions that make let work I think this is actually a common pattern in many different domains. For example, the OS kernel&#x
203.
by cfallin 11y ago
One thing that comes to mind is that GCC's version could have a bit more overhead due to ESP-folding [0]. Basically, reading ESP/RSP directly can incur some overhead, because the register renamer is playing tricks to avoid actuall
204.
by cfallin 11y ago
Prices seem really great but a few paragraphs down they say the servers are based on Avoton SoCs. Intel Avoton is an Atom chip (Silvermont core), so CPU-bound performance will be somewhat lower than the usual Sandy Bridge/Haswell/
205.
by cfallin 11y ago
Books and tools are my two vices as well. Books especially -- there's something to be said for the user-interface both of an individual paper book, and of a whole bookshelf, in terms of ease of navigation. PDFs allow you to grep but sp
206.
by cfallin 11y ago
> "you don't own stuff; the stuff owns you" Reminds me of the George Carlin bit on "stuff". Brilliant commentary on the American way, as always: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac
207.
by cfallin 11y ago
Oh wow, now I really want to see a 200-core-8088-on-FPGA! (Yeah, I know, the necessary NoC and glue would add a ton of overhead. But still!)
208.
by cfallin 11y ago
In principle, it seems you could handle the heterogenous case by designing an `Any` struct and (at least in C++) implicit constructors to take various types (int, T*, ...). At some point this starts to feel like designing a custom ABI and t
209.
by cfallin 11y ago
Stores access the cache too. When you initialize your newly malloc()'d memory, ignoring the previous data, you still benefit from having the cache block present in-cache.
210.
by cfallin 11y ago
Yup, it's definitely its own language! It made me so happy when I saw a Haskell-to-C++-template compiler [1] because of all the similarities in pure-FP style (pattern matching, iteration via recursion, etc). [1] https://gerg

More ›