kmavm

36 ms·

301.
by kmavm 17y ago
The author, Yossi Kreinin, is also one of the most underrated bloggers about software implementation on the planet. Before dismissing him as a one-trick pony language bigot, please sample http://www.yosefk.com/blog/ a bit. http://www.yos
302.
by kmavm 17y ago
"Unfortunately, you can't tell the class of a C++ object given a pointer to it at run time....which is why you can't automatically collect the garbage of C++ programs." That's a somewhat self-serving use of ellipses. Here's the actual text:
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C++ Frequently Questioned Answers(yosefk.com)
60 points by kmavm 17y ago|73 comments
304.
by kmavm 17y ago
I worked on VMware's virtual machine monitor from 2000 until June. Overcoming customers' performance fears was a major impediment in the early years. Every fraction of a percent we gave up relative to native ruled out whole classes of appli
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by kmavm 17y ago
I think the haystack folks made the right decision, here. A rule of thumb is that it takes 3-5 years for a novel on-disk format to gel. There are always random bugs that rely on particular sequences of allocations/deallocations, races, etc.
306.
by kmavm 17y ago
(Not speaking officially, obviously. I had nothing to do with Haystack anyway). They're images. So you flip a bit every once in a great while; as long as the bit isn't part of image metadata, no human user will notice. The next time they lo
307.
by kmavm 17y ago
While I was in my senior year in college (1999) at Brown, there was a fatal accident at a fuel reprocessing facility in Japan. It was a criticality accident; some solution of Ur was put in a bucket or something when it needed to be in a nic
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by kmavm 17y ago
Interesting claim that "language designer" == "mastermind." Being great at designing notation for algorithms (which is what languages really are) is conceptually distinct from what most people think of as being a good programmer. It so happ
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by kmavm 18y ago
First, congratulations. You're making the right decision. Programmers who are ignorant of C leave certain roles and problem domains closed off to them. Even if your primary language is something else, not being afraid to roll up your sleeve
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by kmavm 18y ago
You're absolutely right that I skipped a whole paragraph of your reply; mea culpa.
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by kmavm 18y ago
FWIW, I don't consider CL a member of the "developer productivity" gang of languages. In practice, it is much more like a better C than it is like python: you have C's relative poverty of libraries and richness of tools. Still, I meant what
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by kmavm 18y ago
Since you mention core dumps, please take some unsolicited feedback from an old C programmer: the post-modern "developer productivity" family of languages' lack of core dumps is a bug, not a feature. You want core dumps. They're the right
313.
by kmavm 18y ago
I'm not sure it's fair to summarize the Linux community's complaint about ZFS as the latter being "written for kernels that don't really have a VFS layer." Solaris very much has a VFS layer, and ZFS plays with it. What's different about ZFS
314.
by kmavm 18y ago
I'm reminded of VMware's x86-to-x86 binary translator. In some degenerate sense, this thing is a "compiler", whose input is supervisor-level x86 code, and whose output is sandboxed x86 code. You might imagine a layer like this performing al
315.
by kmavm 18y ago
Oh, wait a minute. It's April 1st, folks. Even Jeff Attwood might not be this bad a programmer.
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by kmavm 18y ago
I get the impression that Jeff is a much better blogger than programmer. And he's not my favorite blogger. I say this not just from his self-deprecation, which I've learned not to take at face value. But these weird non-sequitur "questions"
317.
by kmavm 18y ago
"The result is what's important here, rather than the particular algorithm used to generate this instance of it." Ah, the "computer modeler's" rallying cry. Something that has always worried me about performing "experiments" on computer mod
318.
by kmavm 18y ago
For me, this quote is the hard-earned kernel of wisdom that affirms what I've been saying about transactional memory for the last three years: "Why make the code XTN-friendly when they can make it lock-friendly as well, and have it run fine
319.
by kmavm 18y ago
The article has been prepared for academic publication, and ironically, academic computer science has been somewhat on the trailing edge with respect to preparing documents for the web.
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Experiment comparing patents and markets(marginalrevolution.com)
2 points by kmavm 18y ago|0 comments
321.
by kmavm 18y ago
I should probably be somewhat careful what I say here, but I work for a commercial software company with one of the largest perforce databases (according to perforce) in existence. 3000 developers working on several million lines of code; I
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by kmavm 18y ago
I've investigated this for an industrial-strength, large-scale project in the past. It's technologically interesting; to collect, it "stops the world" (freezing all threads but one using, e.g., POSIX signals) and then uses the CPU registers
323.
by kmavm 18y ago
You don't really get into why mmap is an unpopular choice. It's not as if other programmers just forgot to read the man page. Traditional RDBMSs dislike the OS's buffer cache because the dbms has information that could better drive those al
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by kmavm 18y ago
But Greenspun's claim is that technology has done nothing to ease Malthusian limits, and he's wronger now than he's ever been. At the time Greenspun wandered into this fray, the concern was over human starvation. The situation really is muc
325.
by kmavm 18y ago
I work at a commercial software company, for which I've filed and been granted some patents. I do so even though the pittance my company provides as a "patent bonus" doesn't begin to compensate for the paperwork, writing, iterating with a l
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by kmavm 18y ago
So that's what people who are terrible at their jobs tell themselves: that everybody else is a fraud too. I've always wondered how they got through the day...
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by kmavm 18y ago
I was around during the dot-com bust, and this little piece of revisionist lore always irks me. Something called "Linux" existed in 1998-1999, but it is not the "Linux" you know today, and when stacked up against Solaris running on Sun hard