cliffbean

13 ms·

91.
by cliffbean 14y ago
It's not obvious how optimized C in the '80s wouldn't have been as fast as unoptimized Fortran 77, even with whatever optimization restriction you might be thinking of. The way the authors of that paper talk about unoptimized code in that
92.
by cliffbean 14y ago
From the discussion of their most relevant benchmark (Singular value decomposition): The Allegro CL 4.1 times of 3.9 seconds beat the f77 time of 4.8 [seconds]; Nice! setting on optimization for f77 brought its time down to 0.45
93.
by cliffbean 14y ago
> At the hardware level, you can't swap two variables without using a third. There are situations where that's not true. Consider doing the register allocation for code which does this: void foo(int x, int y) { for (/* stuff */)
94.
by cliffbean 14y ago
> in this case, the RAII wrapper should provide a member function which can execute the underlying close call early and expose the failure, for users who may be interested in guaranteed reliability. Indeed; this is a useful technique. H
95.
by cliffbean 14y ago
> I have little to no idea what a three-line loop will be compiled as, but bloat would be my guess. This is unfortunately too often true. Some compilers are tuned too much for looking good on artificial benchmarks, in which turning 3-li
96.
by cliffbean 14y ago
That's true, until you forget and type foo[i] instead of (* foo)[i]. Of course, compilers will usually catch that mistake at compile time... There'a an interesting analogy with structs here. K&R invented the -> operator specifical
97.
by cliffbean 14y ago
The implicit frame of the implicit frame might be "so let's move everything into the browser". Look at it from the perspective of someone who just wants to use a computer for something a computer could do in 1997. Doing it in a browser to
98.
by cliffbean 14y ago
I borrowed a copy of the Dragon Book from a friend and I'm starting to go through some of the parsing exercises as a refresher. I think the undergraduate compiler course I took used MIPS, so this might be a little different, but I always di
99.
by cliffbean 14y ago
I find your finding of insight in this quote to say more about the challenge of AI than the quote itself ;-). First, the quote directly contradicts itself. The first paragraph says that physicists alone hand their hard problems to others. T
100.
by cliffbean 14y ago
Hypothesis: The difference in feeling that some people get from fonts is like the difference in feeling many people get when they pay a lot for the wine they drink. It's subconscious. It feels like a real feeling. It just isn't driven by th
101.
by cliffbean 14y ago
People are looking at shifts and trying to find trends. It used to be that the trend was towards ever-growing prominence of .NET. With recent shifts, .NET is still present, but other technologies are now filling roles that .NET had been exp
102.
by cliffbean 14y ago
The point is that 3D printing hype is so hyperbolic, I actually took several seconds to read that first part about underwear before realizing that it was a spoof, because it almost sounds like the kind of thing that 3D printing enthusiasts
103.
by cliffbean 14y ago
No, Chrome already has native apps -- NaCl. This headline is about PNaCl, the attempt to make native apps portable.
104.
by cliffbean 14y ago
LLVM's JIT isn't a monolithic entity. There are a bunch of different components and feature options. Some paths are mature and well tested, and others are not. As a result, some projects are using it quite successfully, and some projects wi
105.
by cliffbean 14y ago
Identifying parallelism is important, and the Flow project sounds cool. However it's by no means the only thing we have to do to solve the multicore conundrum. It turns out that there's a lot more to worry about in a cluster or a GPU than j
106.
by cliffbean 14y ago
While there was a "reductio ad absurdam" in there, it appears that term was used in error. From the rest of the post, the complaint appears to have been about an alleged "straw man argument". I have no comment on the issue, I just wanted to
107.
by cliffbean 14y ago
The link he cited still does apply. It discusses several different issues. PNaCl's portability only covers a subset of them.
108.
by cliffbean 14y ago
A lot of people say they want a bytecode for the web. The problem is, bytecode vs text is just an encoding issue, and it's practically insignificant. It's a platform either way, and the real issues are what services the platform will provid
109.
by cliffbean 14y ago
Right now, you can install applications distributed by non-authorized third parties onto many Android systems, and you cannot do so on any iOS system without jailbreaking. There are many other important meanings of "open" which Android may
110.
by cliffbean 14y ago
It's kind of late to be complaining about a new keyword in a language standard from 1999 in 2012. However, it does reflect an attitude I've seen in a variety of places, that C99 is a corruption of the spirit of C, which was most closely cap
111.
by cliffbean 14y ago
There's a danger in taking Star Trek too literally; they often break their own rules in order to suit the needs of their plots. That said... The warp drive rule was a threshold thing. Before a civilization reaches warp drive, they're not su
112.
by cliffbean 14y ago
My OpenWRT box does not have ed either. In my experience, the closest approximation of an editor which will always be there in the real world is sed, not ed.
113.
by cliffbean 14y ago
There may be some truth to this, but it also goes the other way. The modern 6-string guitar became popular in part because it was good for the kinds of music people wanted to play. I, IV, V, and vi (C, F, G, and Am) have a long history afte
114.
by cliffbean 14y ago
Yes, the internet is good at selecting pedantic people for extended discussions of absurdities. However, this doesn't have much significance for whether GPL-style licensing provisions are preferable in the regular world.
115.
by cliffbean 14y ago
Virtually all CPUs today implement two's complement signed integers natively. Even the few C-capable DSPs that I know about do too (and have separate types and operations for saturation etc.). The main loss would be the compiler optimizatio
116.
by cliffbean 14y ago
> 1. To give compilers some leeway when optimizing stuff (for examples, see http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-... ) I'm curious about this. See below. > 2. To make C usable for those worried about erroneou
117.
by cliffbean 14y ago
No, it guarantees 0 or 1; see C99 6.5.8 paragraph 6: these operators "shall yield 1 if the specified relation is true and 0 if it is false."
118.
by cliffbean 14y ago
When I discovered the phrase "Speculative Generality" in Fowler's Refactoring book I suddenly realized there was a name for a problem I already knew I had. This is one specific kind of over-engineering which we can identify -- when creating
119.
by cliffbean 14y ago
This article has a lot of interesting stuff, though it tends to be largely cheerleading LLVM's design decisions, rather than delving into the really interesting tradeoffs. For example, some compilers use multiple levels of optimizer IR, for
120.
by cliffbean 14y ago
Besides PR campaigns, I wonder if another source of hostility to Google+ is a normal human reaction to the fact that social networking, as we currently know it, is a natural monopoly. A lot of people are in the situation where they're going

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