nrclark

35 ms·

421.
by nrclark 6y ago
Tons of software uses the function keys, especially Windows/cross-platform software. Lots of engineering tools, editing tools, content authoring, programming, etc. Removing them would break compatibility with an awful lot of things, in
422.
by nrclark 6y ago
TAP isn't a framework, it's a specification/protocol. Sort of like how HTTP isn't a webserver, it's a protocol that a webserver can speak. TAP is more about the question of "how does a test suite report success
423.
by nrclark 6y ago
TAP is a neat protocol, and I use it in a few of my projects. I was drawn to it because of Automake's built-in TAP support. It took a lot of work out of including a test-suite that "just works" with the "make check"
424.
by nrclark 6y ago
That's an insightful perspective that I hadn't considered.
425.
by nrclark 6y ago
Do you write much system-level software? I feel like Apple's changes don't affect the XCode crowd much - but under the hood, things are slowly getting worse for command-line developers. How about when Apple removed /usr/
426.
by nrclark 6y ago
That's not strictly true about Busybox. You just need to recompile it to change what's included. You can absolutely enable/disable individual tools in the menuconfig.
427.
by nrclark 6y ago
Agreed 100% with this. TCL is a super cool language IMO. It's mature, unixy, and has minimal external dependencies. The ecosystem is stable and slow moving. I would encourage anybody to try it out! The syntax takes some adjustment bec
428.
by nrclark 6y ago
If stock prices represent anything concrete, how is it that Snapchat's market cap is higher than Ford's? Do any of us actually believe that Snap's stock price is reflective of its value to society? Today, stock prices are all
429.
by nrclark 6y ago
Link is paywalled, and should be removed.
430.
by nrclark 6y ago
I know that I'm a small sample size - but in my career so far, "later" means "never" a lot more often than it actually means "later". Especially when it comes to paying down technical debt.
431.
by nrclark 6y ago
re 1 and 2: awesome! I'm excited and will be trying out Horizon my next design. re 3: I was more thinking about the plane spacing. Like say I'm making a board where I want to carry a high-speed clock signal. If it's single-en
432.
by nrclark 6y ago
A few questions - 1. Does the schematic editor support multi-page schematics? Kicad's hierarchical-block approach always feels needlessly clunky to me. 2. Does the PCB editor support planes and copper pours? 3. Does the PCB editor have
433.
by nrclark 6y ago
Agreed 100%. Systemd is a pretty good init system IMO. Service files are good, timers are good, dependency-based init is good. Easy sandboxing is nice. I absolutely _don't_ think that my init system should also be my bootloader. It als
434.
by nrclark 6y ago
Doesn't Bitcoin need miners in order to continue to exist? Why would it possibly make sense to drive the reward for mining down to 0 asymptotically? At the end of that curve, doesn't Bitcoin cease to exist because it can't be
435.
by nrclark 6y ago
Filibustering is an emergent property of profoundly broken processes in our Senate. If remote meetings force some procedural change, that's probably in everybody's best interest.
436.
by nrclark 6y ago
As somebody who also works in embedded systems, I had almost the same experience with Vettery. I tried them out a year or two ago, and found that there was literally no way to add keywords/tags as a user. So if Vettery didn't have
437.
by nrclark 7y ago
Interesting! I didn't know that. Does uintptr_t exist on your platform? If so, how does it work?
438.
by nrclark 7y ago
This is actually more subtle than one would think. Say you were trying to talk to three UART registers at 0xA000, 0xA004, and 0xA008. It's legal to access: *(volatile uint32_t *)(0xA000); *(volatile uint32_t *)(0xA004); *
439.
by nrclark 7y ago
Would it make sense for defer to operate on a scope-block, sort of like an if/do/while/for block instead? That would allow us to write: defer close(file); or: defer { release_hardware(); close(port);
440.
by nrclark 7y ago
That's awesome!!! I'm actually really interested in the semantics of how a defer{} statement might work in C. If you have any kind of a draft or anything, I'd get a kick out of reading over it. Re: developing a paper for cons
441.
by nrclark 7y ago
That's pretty recent for ARM, as they face growing pressure from companies switching to RISC-V for their internal MCUs.
442.
by nrclark 7y ago
I get your point. C is not C++, and it shouldn't get every feature under the sun. But it's also not exactly -complete-. The standards committee makes changes every few years, including language additions. I'm a fulltime C pro
443.
by nrclark 7y ago
If I buy a copy of your book, will you abuse your position to get constexpr into C? It would be a big improvement over complex macro magic. I'll buy an extra copy if you can get 'defer' in there too! Those two features would
444.
by nrclark 7y ago
Zig looks super cool. I've been wanting to experiment with it for some system software. Are there any guides anywhere for calling libc functions from zig? I'm interested in fork/join, chmod, fcntl, and that kind of thing. Do
445.
by nrclark 7y ago
Good to know. Worth pointing out that the C++ standards committee also almost never breaks backwards-compatibility. Instead, they just introduce The New Way (and then The Old Way becomes just one more trap). If you're in a position to
446.
by nrclark 7y ago
I see a lot of people comparing Rust favorably against C++, largely due to C++'s complexity. And yet at the same time, the Rust dev team are changing and expanding the language very quickly. Is there any plan to feature-freeze Rust? Ot
447.
by nrclark 7y ago
The license is a little weird, for one. It's also strange because I think it's the only non-GNU dependency in the whole chain. I guess I'd also have expected a GC scheme to be baked into the core Guile source-code instead of
448.
by nrclark 7y ago
Awesome, I didn't know it had landed in F31. Thanks for the comment. Re: size, I'm surprised by the library size. Is it possible that the library needs more files than just the .so? The guile-2.2-libs package is around 40-43 MB on
449.
by nrclark 7y ago
For those of us stuck working with vanilla GNU Make, you can still use $(shell) to accomplish a lot of what the Guile integration provides. As an example, string-length can farmed out by something like: strlen = $(shell printf "$
450.
by nrclark 7y ago
GNU Make's Guile integration is such a cool feature. The one hiccup with it is that isn't included in the default GNU Make package on any system I've ever used (although it can be installed as make-guile in a few distros). I&

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