froydnj

9 ms·

31.
by froydnj 15y ago
> the FSF does not like allowing proprietary compiler plugins and (I guess) has to little manpower to work on gcc. Fortunately, the FSF is not the entity driving development of GCC. In fact, I can't remember a commit in the last five y
32.
by froydnj 15y ago
Ah, I see I missed that part of your comment. I think we are in agreement on that point, then.
33.
by froydnj 15y ago
It's hard to say without reference to specifics; certainly the MD files have been around since time-immemorial, even if they've been augmented with new features over the years. And the gimple bits were primarily aimed at making the in-memo
34.
by froydnj 15y ago
> That's one problem gcc has, that its architecture description is aged and doesn't have a good way of specifying some things that are very important for 2010s performance, so has had to undergo some major surgery (still in progress).
35.
by froydnj 15y ago
> I enjoyed this article, I always find the argument that "these days you can't beat the compiler" fishy. I enjoyed your example; very clever. I think the "these days you can't beat the compiler" should really be understood to carry a
36.
by froydnj 15y ago
This is a great point; see also http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2589331 The big thing about that article is that the tracking capabilities come from things people actually want in their devices, not from nefarious schemes to follow p
37.
Enabling the surveillance society with cell phones (2007)(jeffjonas.typepad.com)
3 points by froydnj 15y ago|0 comments
38.
by froydnj 15y ago
The context of the copy-on-write win was the bytecode for modules. I don't know that you'd have anybody meddling with the reference counts for that...but I haven't really looked.
39.
by froydnj 15y ago
Sounds very similar to some of the themes William Gibson's recent novels have been riffing on (particularly _Zero History_).
40.
by froydnj 16y ago
Some linkers do what you describe. Not all.
41.
by froydnj 16y ago
FWIW, none other than Guy Steele has cited Java as dragging C++ programmers halfway to Lisp: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
42.
by froydnj 16y ago
Wow, Computation Structures looks like an excellent book; thanks for the reference. I think having Lisp in Small Pieces and SICP is reasonable. Lisp in Small Pieces dives pretty deep, but doesn't cover anything comparable to what chapters
43.
by froydnj 16y ago
Counterpoint: Elements of Programming is an exercise in overengineering written by architecture astronauts. I was not impressed by it.
44.
by froydnj 16y ago
After two years and a rant that happened to get posted to a major tech news site. Doesn't really sound like "paying attention to customers" to me. How many times has this happened in the past two years and why haven't things gotten any
45.
by froydnj 16y ago
It's worth noting that proposals, like JSR 83 ( http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=83 ), to address Java's multi-dimensional array shortcomings have been around for quite some time. Of course, JSR 83 just sat around for five years before bein
46.
by froydnj 16y ago
Surprisingly enough, this was not among the reasons cited in RMS's original "Why you should not use Tcl" post: http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0000.html
47.
The radioactive boy scout: When a teenager attempts to build a breeder reactor(harpers.org)
2 points by froydnj 16y ago|0 comments
48.
by froydnj 16y ago
I think you're illustrating the point of the author: such an option should be the default. The user shouldn't have to go looking for it.
49.
by froydnj 16y ago
Yes, that's the same thing. It's always fun to realize that $HOT_FEATURE in $LANGUAGE is several decades old, instead of several years.
50.
by froydnj 16y ago
The long-term goal of the Go frontend is to be usable with both GCC and LLVM. GCC has excellent medium to long term prospects, too, you know.
51.
by froydnj 16y ago
There was a SoC project for a Python front-end to GCC this past summer. I don't know how far it got.
52.
by froydnj 16y ago
You are correct (you do have to check that the symbol is actually bound prior to dereferencing). But they don't (generally) work that way for symbols with a function binding. I think the rationale here is that it's much more common to hav
53.
by froydnj 16y ago
Alpha is most definitely not a bi-endian architecture; it's little-endian only. PowerPC chips can be either, but the vast, vast majority are big endian.
54.
by froydnj 16y ago
Seriously! Reading the article made me think, "wow, trying to piece together where companies go and who owns what sounds like fun!" (No, I'm not a lawyer.) Certainly sounds like an optimization problem where a computer could do an especi
55.
by froydnj 16y ago
Just because Apple has a copyright assignment on file (i.e. saying that they are able to assign copyright to the FSF) does not mean that every piece of code Apple writes--even if it's connected to GCC--is assigned to the FSF. So Apple can w
56.
by froydnj 16y ago
Networking equipment is another place where 64-bit systems are useful. See chip offerings from places like NetLogic and Cavium, for instance: their multicore MIPS chips are 64-bit. Databases are another place where 64-bit systems shine. M
57.
by froydnj 16y ago
I don't have a good sense of pain points in LLVM; the inliner hacking was a while ago, I don't remember many of the details, and LLVM has surely changed quite a bit since then. As for GCC, I think the pain points are twofold: the documentat
58.
by froydnj 16y ago
I don't know the full story about Apple and GCC; I haven't read all of the mailing list traffic during the relevant period, nor was I around to hear about offline conversations. Certainly I can see Apple modifying bits of GCC to make it mo
59.
by froydnj 16y ago
I wasn't thinking about the ObjC frontend; the ObjC frontend, AIUI, was contributed by NeXT before NeXT became a part of Apple. If you go grab the GCC tarball Apple provides, it has many, many changes from the GCC 4.2 sourcebase. Lots of t
60.
by froydnj 16y ago
I think the dislike of LLVM stems mostly from the company behind it. As you may know, Apple contributed a fair amount of code to GCC, but they also kept a lot of code for themselves. (They did, of course, make it available per GPL, but di

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