geofft

66 ms·

571.
by geofft 5y ago
As a counterargument, the web platform has multiple "frontends" (multiple, unrelated codebases that interpret HTML and JS and CSS, not just multiple engines/renderers), and the argument to avoid the monoculture seems good the
572.
by geofft 5y ago
As background, this is a separate effort from the "GCC Rust" project. This project is using libgccjit, which is basically a library interface to GCC (intended for JITs, but here being used for ahead-of-time compilation), as an alt
573.
by geofft 5y ago
A whole lot of major Substack writers seem to be writing articles of the form "Look at this bad thing that's happening, aren't you upset about it?" Take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=gr
574.
by geofft 5y ago
Fascinatingly, the more you post, the less convinced I am that Ada could ever be suitable for this use case. I looked at all these links to see what's been done: Muen: If I am reading the allocator in https://git.codelabs.ch
575.
by geofft 5y ago
You'd need some sort of standard library, even if not the normal userspace one. The kernel has a pretty sizable "lib" directory which includes all the string functions etc. you'd expect in normal userspace C. For the Rus
576.
by geofft 5y ago
Fixed the link, thanks. There's no attempt at humor here - I'm just trying to get you to explain what, precisely, you mean by "test against a specification to verify implementation" so that we're in agreement on ter
577.
by geofft 5y ago
The people you're replying to aren't glossing over it, the posted article (and the comments predicting the end of the European tech industry) is glossing over it. "European Parliament approves mass surveillance" really m
578.
by geofft 5y ago
If I understand correctly, that post describes a proposal to add "owned refs" to Nim, not an actual language feature, and that proposal was abandoned / postponed in favor of the refcounting approach I linked to: see https:&#
579.
by geofft 5y ago
Right, but (not counting extremely recent work that's directly inspired by Rust and therefore necessarily less mature than Rust's implementation) when you use Ada without a GC, you either have to avoid dynamic allocation or use
580.
by geofft 5y ago
Ken Thompson's speech was made two years before the first draft specification of C was published, so I don't understand how it is connected to language specifications. Here's a way to address the issue he brings up in that sp
581.
by geofft 5y ago
> As one of the developers of this patchset, can you comment on how these contributions will be licensed? Yes, I can comment on this. The licensing is the same as any other submission to the Linux kernel. See https://www.ker
582.
by geofft 5y ago
I agree that the email does not set out a solid argument and the "angry technical shlock" is unclear - that's what I was getting at by "aggressively worded". I think there exists a solid and reasonable argument al
583.
by geofft 5y ago
Right. It is a lack of knowledge, and I know I've seen you argue that Ada has facilities for this before, and I don't know enough Ada to answer that one way or another. I think you and 'grumblenum should team up and write a w
584.
by geofft 5y ago
No, it allocates explicitly when you do that. Vec and String are heap-allocated types, so whenever you use them, you know you're doing an allocation. In C++ you can write code like this: #include <string> #include &lt
585.
by geofft 5y ago
Agreed about the inability to write C, but the part about C++ is simply not true. I don't know about "better" in the general sense, but for the specific use case of the Linux kernel, Linus has identified some entirely reasona
586.
by geofft 5y ago
Safe, GC-less memory allocation. Nim requires a GC, at least runtime refcounting, in order to not leak memory: https://nim-lang.org/docs/gc.html The ownership/lifetime system is basically novel to Rust (well, it&#
587.
by geofft 5y ago
Linus has been critical of C, before, too (e.g. https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/6/5/769 ). If you look at Linus's criticism of C++ (e.g., https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/1/20&#x2
588.
by geofft 5y ago
As one of the developers of this patchset, here is my simple answer: try it. I'd love to see it. I know Rust; I don't know Frama-C or Idris or Ada. What little I know of Ada indicates that it doesn't actually solve the proble
589.
by geofft 5y ago
Both are posted by relatively new accounts (green usernames). This one's most recent comment is shallow complaining about diversity/equity/enclusion. The previous one is named "FreeSpeech" and linked in the comments
590.
by geofft 5y ago
Right, but I think there's a valid question of why you need to ban strings entirely, and why you can't have variable-length allocations provided you use the heap instead of VLAs. (You can.)
591.
by geofft 5y ago
Most kernels do have a heap and they work fine for this purpose, as the article advocates. After all, they need a page allocator to respond to requests from userspace programs for dynamic allocation (unless it's an extremely embedded
592.
by geofft 5y ago
Are those crashing bugs, though? I'm making a very specific and nuanced claim here - that crash reporting is not a required mechanism for delivering high-quality software. If SQLite is low-quality software, but the manner in which
593.
by geofft 5y ago
Crash reporting is only needed if you write software that crashes in the first place. Do you think the SQLite developers have ever felt like they need automated crash reporting from their users? (see https://corecursive.com/
594.
by geofft 5y ago
But if this project does catch on, it indicates that users prefer a pro-privacy Audacity to a bug-free Audacity. That might not be the decision you (or I) would prefer, but I think it's a legitimate decision for users to make and we ou
595.
by geofft 5y ago
It's possible to do this in a way that doesn't reveal your IP - run the update-checking server as a Tor onion service and embed a little client that knows how to connect to the Tor network. Then your entry node doesn't know w
596.
by geofft 5y ago
That is a little confusing, "World Organization" seems to be a pet rescue charity? I'm trying to figure out what the guy's interest is, how he is doing this research, and why academically-affiliated researchers are worki
597.
by geofft 5y ago
Copyright is (and has been, since the earliest days) about protecting the creative expression of an idea. You can't copyright an algorithm, but you certainly can copyright the expression of an algorithm in Python. You cannot copyrigh
598.
by geofft 5y ago
"sleep infinity" works on GNU coreutils as well as recent versions of busybox (which is what Alpine uses as coreutils).
599.
by geofft 5y ago
It is a little disappointing that it's not bike-to-work weather year-round (it gets both too hot and too cold). But I do enjoy winter and snow, so overall I appreciate the changing seasons, and none of the extremes are really too extre
600.
by geofft 5y ago
Every "self-regulatory organization" exists with the implicit threat that the government can and will impose external regulations if the organization doesn't do a good job. FINRA is authorized by law because lawmakers believe

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