pron

44 ms·

631.
by pron 1y ago
Turns out that "killer features" are frequently not killer enough. You mentioned Rust with its memory-safety killer-feature, and yet Rust is quite old now (about as old as Java was when JDK 6 came out or JS was when jQuery came ou
632.
by pron 1y ago
Design choices that are appropriate for low-level programming may be less appropriate for high-level programming and vice versa. In low level programming, you may want to see "on the page" anything that could translate to some mac
633.
by pron 1y ago
If you scroll a bit up on the page from the print example, you'll see more introductory stuff: https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.15.2/#Introducing-the-Co...
634.
by pron 1y ago
Nice post! A minor point: > monitors are incompatible with coroutines If by coroutines the author meant virtual threads, then monitors have always been compatible with virtual threads (which have always needed to adhere to the Thread spe
635.
by pron 1y ago
I posted a few examples below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45865028
636.
by pron 1y ago
It's not about more syntax, it's about design, and how Zig was the first to use partial evaluation to do away with several, rather common, features. It's like how the novelty of the iPhone's touchscreen design was in
637.
by pron 1y ago
I'm still not sure what exactly you're asking, but the implementation of print linked above ( https://ziglang.org/documentation/0.15.2/#Case-Study-print-i... ) typically requires some kind of syntactic mac
638.
by pron 1y ago
An example of Zig not having generics, interfaces, and macros? I don't understand.
639.
by pron 1y ago
If D has a separate feature for one of: generic types, interfaces and macros, then obviously it doesn't use partial evaluation similarly to how Zig does. It seems to me that it has all three: templates, interfaces, and string mixins. S
640.
by pron 1y ago
Ok, so a primary goal of comptime in Zig is to avoid needing certain specialised features while still enjoying their functionality, in particular, generics, interfaces, and macros. I'm not aware of any language that has been able to el
641.
by pron 1y ago
An example of what?
642.
by pron 1y ago
Partial evaluation has been quite well known at least since 1943 and Kleene's Smn proof. It has since been put to use, in various forms, by quite a few languages (including C++ in 1990, and even C in the early seventies). But the exten
643.
by pron 1y ago
Thing is, having a good JIT gives you the performance of partial evaluation pretty much automatically (at the cost of less predictability), as compilation occurs at runtime, so the distinction between compile-time and runtime largely disapp
644.
by pron 1y ago
> I can’t think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised more than Zig. I can say the same (although my career spans only 30 years), or, more accurately, that it's one of the few languages that surprised me mo
645.
by pron 1y ago
But that source X is wrong - intentionally or not, in a biased way or not - does not entail that you should trust source Y. That just doesn't follow. To prefer an alternative source you must find one that is more trustworthy. The pro
646.
by pron 1y ago
I think the president of the United States believes all or nearly all of these things (or claims to). And I did ask such people such questions - for example, people who fly a lot yet and "chemtrails" are poisoning us - but their a
647.
by pron 1y ago
Ok, so what is a consistent epistemology that would lead someone to (probably an American) to believe the following things: planes are safe, atoms and viruses are real, the world is a globe, vaccines cause autism, Tylenol causes autism, vit
648.
by pron 1y ago
Yes, but their choice of whom to trust is wildly inconsistent. There is no consistent test of how they judge some claim more or less trustworthy against an opposite claim. Of course, none of us are fully consistent, but some are just extrem
649.
by pron 1y ago
So the position of a sceptic is epistemologically valid: you distrust any claim that is under, say, 95% certainty. But this bar should be applied consistently, and sometimes you have to bet. For example, in the question of getting a vaccine
650.
by pron 1y ago
... and since we now know the world is more complex than what we used to think, say, 1000 years ago, this kind of "second-order thinking" is required more and more.
651.
by pron 1y ago
> You have to consider circumstantial factors as well This, too, goes into the probability of something being right or wrong. But the problem I'm pointing out is an inconsistent epistemology. The same kind of test should be applied
652.
by pron 1y ago
The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've n
653.
by pron 1y ago
Python is doing very well, and the really good thing about established languages is that their pros and cons are known. Not many people would choose Python to write a high-performance server or a program that's expected to grow to a
654.
by pron 1y ago
> without undefined behavior Undefined behaviour is defined with respect to the source language, not the execution engine. It means that the language specification does not assign meaning to certain source programs. Machine code (general
655.
by pron 1y ago
A reasonable rate at which to consider a new primary programming language for non-niche, non-throwaway production software is once every 15 years. Adventurous, risk-seeking teams can try for 10, but that's pushing it. If you find you
656.
by pron 1y ago
In some of those benchmarks, Quarkus (which is very much "typical Java") beats Axum, and there's far more software being written in "niche Java" than in "typical Rust". As for Netty, it's "avoidi
657.
by pron 1y ago
You can start trying the first part of Project Valhalla today (with a ready-made JDK build): https://inside.java/2025/10/27/try-jep-401-value-classes/ No specialised generics at first, and this "bet
658.
by pron 1y ago
It's interesting just how much of the debate in modern logic boils down to aesthetic preferences. On the other hand, I guess that if there were overwhelming practical advantages, there wouldn't be much to debate... BTW, here'
659.
by pron 1y ago
I'm only an "AI sceptic" in the sense that I think that today's LLM models cannot regularly and substantially reduce my workload, not because they aren't able to perform interesting programming tasks (they are!),
660.
by pron 1y ago
Mitre place spatial memory safety higher on the list: https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html (also >3x KEV)

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