thomasmg

6 ms·

61.
by thomasmg 9mo ago
Yes. I did the exact same thing a few weeks ago (in Java, but the idea is to port it to my own programming language). I wrote a terminal UI. Lots of small challenges. Many things to learn, like minimax, bitboards, immutable vs mutable.
62.
by thomasmg 10mo ago
Heap sort is in-place (and does not even need recursion, unlike quicksort). But yes, it is not stable, and usually slower than even shell sort (except for very large arrays).
63.
by thomasmg 10mo ago
I'm surprised that the simple, ~80 lines version of stable-in-place merge sort (see link in the above comments) is not more widely known. It is O(n log n log n) and not all that hard to implement.
64.
by thomasmg 10mo ago
There is stable in-place merge sort [1], which is O(n*log(n)^2) and not that complex or hard to implement (about 80 lines, and that includes the ~15 lines of binarySearch, which you might need anyway). [1] https://github.com&#x2F
65.
by thomasmg 10mo ago
There is stable in-place merge sort, it runs in O(n*log(n)^2). It is about 3 times more complex than shell sort. I implemented it here https://github.com/thomasmueller/bau-lang/blob/main/src/test...
66.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Yes I know Java and the challenges with exceptions there (checked vs unchecked exceptions, errors). But at least (arguably) in Java, the methods (for checked exceptions at least) declares what class the exception / exceptions is. I per
67.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
I saw that in Swift, a method can declare it throws an exception, but it doesn't (can't) declare the exception _type_. I'm not a regular user of Swift (I usually use Java - I'm not sure what other languages you are famil
68.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
I agree security issues are often hyped nowadays. I think this is often due to two factors: (A) security researches get more money if they can convince people a CVE is worse. So of course they make it sound extremely bad. (B) security &quot
69.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
> then the sort order there is indeterminate Well each programming language has a "sort" method that sorts arrays. Should this method throw an exception in case of NaN? I think the NaN rules were the wrong decision. Because of
70.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Well floating point operations never throw an exception, which I kind of like, personally. I would rather go in the opposite direction and change integer division by zero to return MAX / MIN / 0. But NaN could be defined to be sma
71.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Well I didn't mean GC is the reason for Fil-C being slower. I mean the performance drop of Fil-C (as described in the article) limits the usage, and the GC (independently) limits the usage. I understand raw speed (of the main thread) o
72.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
I find floating point NaN != NaN quite annoying. But this is not related to Rust: this affects all programming languages that support floating point. All libraries that want to support ordering for floating point need to handle this special
73.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Sure, it's not a big performance drain. For the vast majority of software, it is fine. Usually, the ability to write programs more quickly in eg. Java (not having to care about memory management) outweighs the possible gain of Rust tha
74.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean there is a bug _in the garbage collection algorithm_, if the object is not freed in the very next garbage collection cycle? Well, it depends: the garbage collection could defers collection of som
75.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Ok, you are right. My point is, yes it is possible to panic on use-after-free with Fil-C. With Fil-C, a life reference to a freed object can be detected.
76.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
You are right, languages with tracing GC are fast. Often, they are faster than C or Rust, if you measure peak performance of a micro-benchmark that does a lot of memory management. But that is only true if you just measure the speed of the
77.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
I agree transpile to C will not result in the fastest code (and of course not the fastest toolchain), but having the ability to convert to C does help in some cases. Besides the ability to support some more obscure targets, I found it'
78.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Yes. I do like Swift as a language. The main disadvantages of Swift, in my view, are: (A) The lack of an (optional) "ownership" model for memory management. So you _have_ to use reference counting everywhere. That limits the perfo
79.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Yes, Fil-C uses some kind of garbage collector. But it can still detect use-after-free: In the 'free' call, the object is marked as free. In the garbage collection (in the mark phase), if a reference is detected to an object that
80.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
I don't think it's odd statement. It's not about segfaults, but use-after-free (and similar) bugs, which don't crash in C, but do crash in Fil-C. With Fil-C, if there is such a bug, it will crash, but if the density of s
81.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Well "transpiling to C" does include GCC and clang, right? Sure, trying to support _all_ C compilers is nearly impossible, and not what I mean. Quite many languages support transpiling to C (even Go and Lua), but in my view that a
82.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
There are surprisingly many languages that support transpiling to C: Python (via Cython), Go (via TinyGo), Lua (via eLua), Nim, Zig, Vlang. The main advantage (in my view) is to support embedded systems, which might not match your use case.
83.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
I agree. Nim is memory safe, concise, and fast. In my view, Nim lacks a very clear memory management strategy: it supports ARC, ORC, manual (unsafe) allocation, move semantics. Maybe supporting viewer options would be better? Usually, addin
84.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Yes, safety got more important, and it's great to support old C code in a safe way. The performance drop and specially the GC of Fil-C do limit the usage however. I read there are some ideas for Fil-C without GC; I would love to hear m
85.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Pypy is great for performance. I'm writing my own programming language (that transpiles to C) and for this purpose converted a few benchmarks to some popular languages (C, Java, Rust, Swift, Python, Go, Nim, Zig, V). Most languages hav
86.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Interesting, I was not aware of OxCaml. (If this is what you mean.) It does seem to tick a few boxes actually. For my taste, the syntax is not as concise / clean as Python, and for me, it is "too functional". It shares with P
87.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
Yes, there are quite many real-world cases of this architecure. But, wouldn't it be better it the same language (more or less) can be used for both? I don't think such a language exists currently, but I think it would be a nice go
88.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
> the language most of the team know the best I fully agree. The challenge is, some will want to use the latest languages and technologies because they want to learn it (personal development, meaning: the next job). Sometimes the "n
89.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
What one considers a "good bread" or "good bakery" depends on the person. I'm from Switzerland. When I was in the United States (Bay Area, San Francisco), in 2000-2003, I did _not_ find what I consider a "good
90.
by thomasmg 11mo ago
The author of Fil-C does have some ideas to avoid a garbage collector [1], in summary: Use-after-free at worst means you might see an object of the same size, but you can not corrupt data structures (no pointer / integer confusion). Th

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