skohan

32 ms·

211.
by skohan 4y ago
> E.g. you can take raw pointer, and set two mutable variables to point to it and borrow checker can't know they point to same address. That sounds an awful lot like bypassing the borrow checker. > As far as I know Zig can't
212.
by skohan 4y ago
Thank you for the thoughtful response! A few thoughts: > You can't bypass borrow checker, and you wouldn't do everything in unsafe. Isn't unsafe still bypassing the borrow checker, in the sense that you're mostly usin
213.
by skohan 4y ago
Yeah it's fascinating. In my very unscientific mental model for cognition, there's a distinction between "active" and "passive" mental operations. "Active" is anything requiring intention - when you
214.
by skohan 4y ago
A spreadsheet with probably at least thousands of columns and billions or trillions of rows.
215.
by skohan 4y ago
That's intentional. There's no reason you couldn't have apps be more interoperable through open standards, but vendors want to keep you locked in their ecosystem.
216.
by skohan 4y ago
WhatsApp might succeed because it's less of a kitchen sink. WhatsApp is mainly about private communication. It's an app you feel like you control, where you're not being bombarded by advertising. Somehow payments feel ps
217.
by skohan 4y ago
I don't necessarily think people want an MS-like offering that does everything. I think an enterprise package like MS offers is successful, because it makes life easy for people who handle procurement and IT management at large firm
218.
by skohan 4y ago
Using unsafe blocks would fall into the category of "sidestepping the borrow checker". Again, it's possible to do it, but if you're going to do everything in unsafe rust why not just use an unsafe language in the first
219.
by skohan 4y ago
With all due respect, your comments seem to imply a certain level of immaturity and it does not seem like you really know what you are talking about. It's possible in some cases that you can implement something in JavaScript which is c
220.
by skohan 4y ago
C/C++ have been used to implement the backbone of computing for 50 years. That is a proven technology. I'm not diminishing the success of Rust. It's been proven it can be used for serious projects. It's a bit of a reac
221.
by skohan 4y ago
According to who? It's absolutely not the consensus that every programming language needs to prioritize safety. Rust is still very much an experiment in terms of systems programming. It has a tiny overall "market share" in
222.
by skohan 4y ago
That position is not only new, it's also not the consensus. Zig explicitly chooses to make memory safety a non-goal of the language, with the argument that Rust-style memory safety is a costly tradeoff which is not always justified. A
223.
by skohan 4y ago
Zig has very different goals than Rust. The explicit theory of the language is that Rust's approach to memory safety creates costly tradeoffs which are not needed for all use-cases. It is very much not the consensus that memory safety
224.
by skohan 4y ago
That's extremely hyperbolic. Zig is a systems programming language with an explicit goal of operating at a low level of abstraction. Virtually all languages in its class are less memory safe than Zig.
225.
by skohan 4y ago
That's a rather extreme position.
226.
by skohan 4y ago
It can just be limiting in terms of ergonomics. Like I've implemented a couple of ECS's and what you want to do is dispatch a bunch of threads over big swaths of structured memory. One of the main things the borrow checker doesn
227.
by skohan 4y ago
Arguably Zig is a better fit for game dev. At the high end game dev is all about memory layouts and cache optimization, and that goal can run counter to Rust's approach to memory safety.
228.
by skohan 4y ago
That's a fair point, 10 years might be a bit hyperbolic. On the other hand, Smartphones were better positioned to drive adoption that eSIMs are. Smartphones create immediate utility for the user over feature phones. eSIM is arguably
229.
by skohan 4y ago
In the presentation.
230.
by skohan 4y ago
Do they have a clear incentive? We're only talking about iPhones purchased in the US, so basically this only affects US tourists or expats in Africa which is going to be a tiny number of potential customers. It remains to be seen if A
231.
by skohan 4y ago
But you still have the option of using an eSIM/Google Fi in countries where local sims are problematic when you also have a sim tray. If you lose the sim tray, you are at a disadvantage in places where local sims are the best option, w
232.
by skohan 4y ago
That's $44 for 15 days and 6 GB! If I recall correctly, I was paying like a dollar a gigabyte or something on a local sim. You would go to any market and there would be these guys walking around with rolls of activation codes which y
233.
by skohan 4y ago
I have traveled quite extensively in the developing and developed world and in my experience it’s a rare exception not to be able to get a local sim easily. In most cases you can have one before leaving the airport.
234.
by skohan 4y ago
I don’t see how the need to provide for US tourists will drive adoption around the world
235.
by skohan 4y ago
That’s nice but it’s still going to be 10 years or more until it’s as convenient as SIM cards everywhere. When I crossed the border from Rwanda to Uganda, I bought a sim at a local shop, and a boy from the village cut it down to size by han
236.
by skohan 4y ago
Zig might be a good alternative as it matures. As far as I understand, zig makes a lot of things explicit which are not in C, like explicitly passing the allocator when it’s needed. This might be even more edifying than C which has a littl
237.
by skohan 4y ago
There's a ton of software that succeeds at being easy. NPM for example is amazing - just write a simple package.json file and 99% of the time you have a perfectly portable project which you can run anywhere with a few simple commands.
238.
by skohan 4y ago
Getting into semiconductors is probably substantially more complicated. Only a handful of companies are able to do it well and they have bene at it for decades.
239.
by skohan 4y ago
It's not about the features it's about priorities. In principal as you say you can just ignore the bits you don't use, but there are still some glaring holes like variadic generics which didn't get attention presumably
240.
by skohan 4y ago
I still think there's a lot to like about Swift, and actually programming in some subset of Swift is some of the most fun and expressive programming I can think of, but it has undoubtedly become kind of a mess. A lot of magic happenin

More ›