pron

36 ms·

481.
Paul Krugman: Talking with Gabriel Zucman(youtube.com)
3 points by pron 9mo ago|0 comments
482.
by pron 9mo ago
> Hint: it's a computer. Not quite, but in any event none of the avionics is an LLM or a program generated by one.
483.
by pron 9mo ago
This is my problem with the whole "can LLMs code?" discussion. Obviously, LLMs can produce code, well even, much like a champion golfer can get a hole in one. But can they code in the sense of "the pilot can fly the plane&quo
484.
by pron 9mo ago
> So most Rust programs mostly use GC, yet it's not a GC language; those are some very mind-contorting definitions. I don't think these definitions are very meaningful. In memory management literature, any technique that reclai
485.
by pron 10mo ago
Except deciding whether an implementation exists or not is itself not a tractable problem in the general case.
486.
by pron 10mo ago
A fundamental problem is that program verification is intractable in the computational complexity sense. The question of whether a program satisfies a spec or not is called in the literature the model checking problem (not to be confused wi
487.
by pron 10mo ago
> Does that include Rust? No. Most memory management in Rust is not through it's GC, even though most Rust programs do use the GC to some extent. > I'm not looking at current social/market trends but limits of physics a
488.
by pron 10mo ago
> It's compilers and compiler optimizations that make code run fast. Compiler optimisations certainly play a large role, but they're not the only thing. Tracing-moving garbage collectors can trade off CPU usage for memory footp
489.
by pron 10mo ago
It's probably in the same ballpark. To me, the contenders for "the fastest language" include Java, C#, and Go and not many more.
490.
by pron 10mo ago
Right, but if we assume that programmers' compensation is statistically correlated with their skill, then we can drop "average" and just talk about budget.
491.
by pron 10mo ago
I don't think so, but it may not be far behind. More importantly, though, I'm fairly confident it won't be Assembly, or C, or C++, or Rust, or Zig, but also not Python, or TS/JS. The candidates would most likely include
492.
by pron 10mo ago
I may be biased, but I think that if you have a budget that's reasonable in the industry for some project size and includes not only the initial development but also maintenance and evolution over the software's lifetime, especial
493.
by pron 10mo ago
The question is what do we mean by "a fast language"? We could mean it to be how fast the fastest code that a performance expert in that language, with no resource constraints, could write. Or, we can restrict it to "idiomati
494.
by pron 10mo ago
> Without ever increasing memory/CPU, you're going to have to squeeze more performance out of the stone (more or less unchanging memory/CPUs). The memory overhead of a moving collector is related only to the allocation rat
495.
by pron 10mo ago
I don't know about the numbers. Some of Zig's famous proponents are Rust experts. I don't know the specific percentages, but you could level a similar accusation at Rust's proponents, too, i.e. that they have insufficien
496.
by pron 10mo ago
> It's not that it's a novel or strange theory, it's just wrong. Okay. Can you provide an example of a language that steadily and gradually grew in popularity over a long time (well over a decade) and that this slow growth
497.
by pron 10mo ago
P.S. I spoke with someone at AWS, and he says that there is an investment in using Rust for low-level code, but there is no company-wide mandate, and projects are free to pick C or C++.
498.
by pron 10mo ago
> C also has a GC. See Boehm GC. And before you complain RC is part of std I will point that std is optional and is on track to become a freestanding library. Come on. The majority of Rust programs use the GC. I don't understand why
499.
by pron 10mo ago
> Calling anything with opt-in reference counting a GC language Except I never called it "a GC language" (whatever that means). I said, and I quote, "Rust does have a GC". And it does. Saying that it's "opt
500.
by pron 10mo ago
This is comparing what Rust has and other languages don't without also doing the opposite. For example, Java doesn't enforce data-race freedom, but its data races are safe, which means you can write algorithms with benign races sa
501.
by pron 10mo ago
Then we're in agreement. Both languages give you something that may be important, but it has a price.
502.
by pron 10mo ago
> It is a clear mandate on those companies that whatever used to be C or C++, should be written in Rust for green field development. Whatever could be done in programming languages with automatic memory management was already being done.
503.
by pron 10mo ago
> Not really modern, it is Object Pascal/Modula-2 repackaged in C like syntax. That's your opinion, but I couldn't disagree more. It places partial evaluation as its biggest focus more so than any other language in history
504.
by pron 10mo ago
"modern: relating to the present or recent times as opposed to the remote past". I agree it's not a useful concept here but I didn't bring it up. Specifically, I don't think there's any consideration that had g
505.
by pron 10mo ago
> If you define all non-red colors to be green, it is impossible to talk about color theory. Except reference counting is one of the two classical GC algorithms (alongside tracing), so I think it's strange to treat it as "not
506.
by pron 10mo ago
> And "opt-in non-tracing GC that isn't used largely throughout the standard library" is not a reasonable definition. Given that refcounting and tracing are the two classic GC algorithms, I don't see what specifying &
507.
by pron 10mo ago
> It has for Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Google and the Linux kernel. I don't think so. I don't know about Adobe, but it's not a meaningful statement for the rest. Those companies default to writing safe code in languages ot
508.
by pron 10mo ago
First, Zig is more modern than any of the languages you mention. Second, I'm not aware that any of those languages offer arenas similar in their power and utility to Zig's while offering UAF-freedom at the same time. Note that &qu
509.
by pron 10mo ago
Rust does have a GC, but I agree it planted its flag at some intermediate point on the spectrum. Zig didn't "go backwards" but planted its own flag ever so slightly closer to C than to ATS (although both Rust and Zig are almo
510.
by pron 10mo ago
That's a very narrow way of looking at things. ATS has a much stronger "deterministic safety net" than Rust, yet the reason to use Rust over ATS is that "fighting the compiler" is easier in Rust than in ATS. On the

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