kabdib

59 ms·

631.
by kabdib 7y ago
Apple's Pascal had function pointers, and I'm pretty sure you could still do callbacks to nested procedures with a little trickery. Ahh, I was right (PDF file here): http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/develo
632.
by kabdib 7y ago
These are indeed the places where Apple extended their version of Pascal. C-style calling convention support, pointer arithmetic, much better I/O, and a host of things I can't remember. Suffice to say that when I started working
633.
by kabdib 7y ago
Apple's version of Pascal had a lot of non-standard extensions. If you squinted, it was essentially C.
634.
by kabdib 7y ago
If you do this, you will regret it and it will cost you money.
635.
by kabdib 7y ago
You're correct about C99. I cut my teeth on K&R; C99 has inline declarations.
636.
by kabdib 7y ago
Right, inlines are hard to beat, and they are not part of the C standard (which is kind of mind boggling, I mean . . . honestly, what year is it?). Still, the benefit of inlines diminishes as the size of the inlined functions increases (you
637.
by kabdib 7y ago
> It has been slower than C++ ever since reasonable optimization was implemented. Which compilers? Which platforms? Optimized for speed or space (because "faster" is only one dimension of optimization)? Many C / C++ compil
638.
by kabdib 7y ago
> This undermines the profession, at loss to the public It does? I've seen really good engineering done by people who don't even have degrees in engineering (or degrees at all, for that matter). Contrariwise, utter disasters by
639.
by kabdib 7y ago
The last time I saw the areas covered by a PE exam for Software Engineering was maybe 25 years ago, in California. Over half the exam was electrical engineering. Less than a third was actually about anything related to software. Near as I c
640.
by kabdib 7y ago
The effort started out as "agile" and then turned evil six months to a year later. Scrum planning sessions, scrum masters, funny hats, we had it all. It's not a stretch.
641.
by kabdib 7y ago
When my 2014 era MacBook Pro dies, I have an XPS15 waiting in the wings. Unless Apple makes significant design improvements, I'm not going back. Windows is terrible in a number of ways, but it's improved dramatically in the last f
642.
by kabdib 7y ago
How is this uninclusive? I'm not arguing, just want to understand your analysis.
643.
by kabdib 7y ago
There was a big push for Agile in my old group at Microsoft (no names here). It was basically micromanagement. I saw hours-long, daily meetings by PMs and managers who were digging into the "velocity" of individual developers. The
644.
by kabdib 7y ago
The good news is that there are fantastically good shops to work for (you should start looking for one), and that you'll have some good stories to tell about the hellmouth that was your first company. But yeah, get the heck out of ther
645.
by kabdib 7y ago
You lose benefits and the possibility of taking legal action against the (former) employer if you quit. Even in "at will" employment states you can sue for unlawful termination.
646.
by kabdib 7y ago
Henry S F Cooper Jr.'s book The Evening Star: Venus Observed describes a similar problem, remote debugging of a race condition (and some other things) of a spacecraft orbiting Venus. Recommended reading for both space and computer ge
647.
by kabdib 7y ago
Huh. Today is my 40th year of writing software as a professional (getting paid for it, I mean -- I was writing code long before my first real job). Anyway, in all that time I've done (...counts...) four all-nighters. I did plenty of ni
648.
by kabdib 7y ago
"Ten across, 7 letters, synonym for 'Prepper'". "Refugee." "That works."
649.
by kabdib 7y ago
First, there's a deterrent effect. 300M guns (not spread out evenly, it looks like there's a power law distribution going on) is simply not ignorable. Nor is the culture that has them ignorable; these people are significantly be
650.
by kabdib 7y ago
There's probably enough jitter in the memory system and in instruction parallelism that accurate cycle counting will still be challenging. Also, you probably want some padding so that newer versions of the CPU can be used without too m
651.
by kabdib 7y ago
Or, you play by the rules and your old code continues to just work. Might not be optimal, but at least it will run. Your customers will thank you . . . well, we all know they won't, but they won't be speculating about your ancestr
652.
by kabdib 7y ago
+1, and you don't have to worry about having three bookmarks placed correctly :-)
653.
by kabdib 7y ago
I am personally in favor of simple, physically based voting systems. The kind that can still work reliably during periods of unrest and mistrust.
654.
by kabdib 7y ago
> Nothing on x86_64 is returning "full 64 bit pointers" Well, I'm going from the processor reference manuals from Intel and AMD. Existing implementations are 48 bits, and future implementations WILL have more. I trust thes
655.
by kabdib 7y ago
If your allocator calls mmap or an equivalent, and the OS gives you back a pointer that uses all 64 bits (or more than 48, anyway) then what do you do? I guess the allocator has to retry and pray, or maybe just give up and fail. In any even
656.
by kabdib 7y ago
The most significant bits, yes. (The world numbers these from 0 to N, least significant to most significant. IBM numbers them from 1 to 32, with 1 being most significant. I guess that made sense to accountants).
657.
by kabdib 7y ago
You'll have to deal with APIs that do return full 64-bit pointers with real information in the top bits. You won't be able to play games with these bits. Stuff is going to break unless you are careful. If you are shipping a plat
658.
by kabdib 7y ago
Thanks! I had a feeling it was Mencken, it certainly sounds like him.
659.
by kabdib 7y ago
"Repurposing Top Bits" - don't do that. Honest. The IBM 360 shipped with 32-bit addresses but only 24 bits decoded. "Hey, there's a whole byte up top that nobody's using today, let's put some stuff there!&
660.
by kabdib 7y ago
"Democracy is government for the people, by the people, on the principle that the people should get the kind of government that they deserve, good and hard." [wish i could attribute this, but i don't remember where i first he

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