josephg

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211.
by josephg 2mo ago
We can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible. I started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to th
212.
by josephg 2mo ago
I think the way humans divide up design and programming are broadly correct. Working that way with LLMs seems to work well. I vibe coded an iOS conference schedule app recently, built on top of my own rust UI framework. I started with claud
213.
by josephg 2mo ago
Yes, plenty of times. But I’m usually using raw byte arrays via protobuf or something similar. ASCII only text protocols are rare. Most devs don’t reimplement them from scratch. I’d wager most code is application code, where UTF8 strings ar
214.
by josephg 2mo ago
> Is it a good enough idea to sync MMO game clients and servers? After 15 years in the trenches on this stuff, no I don’t think so. Some operations need a clearly defined order for correctness. For example, financial transactions or item
215.
by josephg 2mo ago
I had the same experience with my own country, Australia. I enjoyed moving to the Bay Area for work, and I treasure the couple years I lived there. But I also really enjoyed moving back to Australia again. I feel like it’s impossible to tru
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by josephg 2mo ago
Sure, but most code doesn't interact with raw packets. Legacy, ascii-only internet standards probably make up much less than 1% of new lines of code written today. Programming languages should support this use case. But not at the expe
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by josephg 2mo ago
True, but humans have been speaking non English languages since humans.
218.
by josephg 2mo ago
I disagree. UTF-8 is the right default. Pure ASCII strings are rarely needed in modern software. Unless you know that you need ASCII, your strings should support unicode.
219.
by josephg 2mo ago
It drove me nuts in the cryptocurrency boom that people shortened cryptocurrency to "crypto". As in, "I'm into crypto" or "I work in crypto". Cryptography is much older than bitcoin.
220.
by josephg 2mo ago
> And do you think the NSA desperately needed $90 mil (the amount stolen so far) If this was done as part of an operation, we would have no idea what it was actually used for. It’s very unlikely that the crypto wallet thefts we know abou
221.
by josephg 3mo ago
So? Anyone could make this set of a pictures. But we didn't. I enjoyed seeing these pictures. If you think you can make better content, do so. I look forward to upvoting what you make. But until then, telling people to "investigat
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by josephg 3mo ago
I think the images are awesome and inspiring. If there are greener pastures for you, why bother commenting? Go do whatever makes you happy. I enjoy seeing this cool art.
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by josephg 3mo ago
Good to know! Would there be any way languages like Go or C# could adopt Nim's new garbage collector? If it's better, what stops other languages from using it? > GC programs can be faster than manually managed ones in some case
224.
by josephg 3mo ago
My main problem with Fil-C is that it combines the worst parts of C with the worst parts of a GC language. In a language like C (or Zig), you need to manually manage memory. This makes programming a lot more complex, and it's really ea
225.
by josephg 3mo ago
> Rustations have this very bad habit (IMO) of pushing the "my language is better than yours" to an extreme It’s funny, I’ve heard people claim this about rust developers for years. But I’ve seen very little evidence of it. Wh
226.
by josephg 3mo ago
Yeah. In that thread the Fil-C author said of typescript, go and C#: > Those languages rely on a much larger pile of YOLO C/C++ code for their runtimes and standard libraries than Fil-C does. So Fil-C is safer than those Given the r
227.
by josephg 3mo ago
2x slower and 4x less memory efficient were the numbers I heard a year or so ago. Reaching within 20% of full native performance while using a garbage collector sounds too good to be true. Do you have any actual benchmarks?
228.
by josephg 3mo ago
Yep this. I’m a paid subscriber to the economist’s podcast. A lot of their journalism is excellent. I really enjoyed the recent Tocqueville road trip. And their coverage of AI a few months ago was great - it was really interesting to hear w
229.
by josephg 3mo ago
> Fil-C probably still has a pretty good edge on python's performance, though. Probably - but where are the benchmarks? > Python […] generally doesn't scale well (in terms of size of team and codebase). I’d argue neither doe
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by josephg 3mo ago
> python is gonna be the easier option 99% of the time If python/go/C# is easier to write, why choose C? Fil-C removes C’s performance and interoperability advantages.
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by josephg 3mo ago
> suddenly it is welcome that I know C and C++ versus most folks on the team. Yeah I know the feeling. But you don’t need Fil-C to learn C. That said, with a GC, you could make some great tools & visualisations for learning C and und
232.
by josephg 3mo ago
If you’re using SeL4, userland processes are already strictly sandboxed. There’s still some benefit to Fil-C, since the added memory safety would make it much more difficult to take over a process. But the blast radius of a compromised prog
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by josephg 3mo ago
The benefit also isn’t as big as you might expect. Most of Linux’s recently found security vulnerabilities were due to ToC/ToU bugs. Fil-C would not magically fix these problems. It would sometimes be a good trade off, for some users.
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by josephg 3mo ago
> But what is being overlooked, is the massive numerical dominance of C programmers I roll to doubt. I haven’t seen C topping programming language popularity charts for a long, long time. I used to interview software engineering candidat
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by josephg 3mo ago
The number of lines of raw C isn’t the only way to measure the trustworthiness of a codebase. Go, C# and friends may be bigger projects. But they’re also more mature projects. At this point, far more eyeballs have scoured their codebases lo
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by josephg 3mo ago
These are all true? I don’t see the problem? Rust does prefer static checks. It uses static analysis to prevent many types of bugs - including use-after-free and data races. But you’re right; rust still falls back to runtime checks when s
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by josephg 3mo ago
If you want a slow, garbage collected language in the Python ecosystem, why not just write Python?
238.
by josephg 3mo ago
Do you want your kernel to be 2x slower and use 4x as much memory?
239.
by josephg 3mo ago
I think Fil-C might make a lot of sense for running legacy C or C++ codebases. But for new code, it seems like it’s trying to compete with other GC languages. Take away C’s performance advantages and I don’t know why anyone would use it. Fi
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by josephg 3mo ago
How does it compare to the equivalent code in Typescript, Go or C#? Those languages all have “safe” syscall wrappers too, for a subset of syscalls.

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