vnorilo

12 ms·

121.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Sure; but "historical baggage" is a function of multi-paradigm and outliving multiple generations of computer architecture. I would not view baggage as necessarily problematic. What makes C++ problematic is that template metaprogr
122.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Practical, old languages tend to do this. In C++ or Common Lisp, which share little other than being multi-paradigm (unopinionated), it is fairly common to have house styles or accepted subsets. Languages that try to build in some "hou
123.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Yep - Here in Finland, just over the bay in the north, the Estonian e-prescription system is often quoted as much leaner, meaner and more functional than our own borked attempt, at a fraction of the cost.
124.
by vnorilo 5y ago
You'd be surprised how stable it actually is in practice. The occasional big swings in benchmarks tend to be due to compiler A pattern-matching an idiom that compiler B does not. Regressions from A.1 to A.2 are rare, and usually either
125.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Agreed with "usually". When you model pipelines, you must know the cache behaviour of your workload, otherwise it is a waste of time. But when you do, in order to approach theoretical machine limits, you do need airtight core reso
126.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Ah, one resource that slipped my mind was Jon Stokes' microarchitecture articles [0] at Ars Technica when it was still good (it's all gadget/lifestyle/policy stuff nowadays). Jon also has this book which I seem to rememb
127.
by vnorilo 5y ago
What I think of as "pipeline model" is similar to what LLVM-MCA produces in its "Timeline View" [1] It basically tries to model statically how instructions travel through the pipeline of a particular CPU, which is useful
128.
by vnorilo 5y ago
One good starting point is the LLVM Machine Code Analyzer [1] What it does is use the scheduling info known to the LLVM optimizers to model how a particular CPU is going to execute your machine code. I was lucky to start doing this back in
129.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Most of the time I've written performance sensitive C or C++, I spend most of the time looking at disassembly or pipeline models, trying to spin up an instruction mix that will utilize the CPU backend in a good way. In the best case, t
130.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I used a similar trick to write my resume site [1] with a "spatial" transition effect inside a single html file with no javascript. It's a bit of a weird flex but was fun to do. 1: https://norilo.me/
131.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I mean, for most DOS games the "video driver" was one interrupt and start writing pixels to framebuffer at 0xa0000. Sound drivers were more complicated, but there were a ton of libraries - it's how FMod got started!
132.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I'm not sure gender inequality can be solved by some magic machine making gender disappear. Rather we can progress by making inequality visible and challenging it: only when attitudes change we will slowly improve. The HN crowd might l
133.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I think "high iteration time" taken to the extreme is programming without a computer, like when taking a walk. You construct a very detailed mental model of how the program operates and interrogate it in your head. This only works
134.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Very interesting. I have some pretty strong habits (in addition to the obvious stuff like firmness) in picking veggies and fruit, like narrow cucumbers and small tomatoes. When I buy Apples I look for strong stripes. Mostly honey crisp and
135.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Probably farriers, who specialize in horse shoes. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farrier
136.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Did anyone try it? I'm interested in the binary size for a nontrivial language. That is what killed my own attempt at doing this - the code was large enough that I had to move some polymorphism from compile time to run time in order to
137.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Yes, we say "yksitoista" (one of second), "kaksitoista (two of second) and so on until twenty, where we revert to "kaksikymmentäyksi" (two tens and one; ten in actual plural). But in some old books from the early 20
138.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Sibling provided a good overview of philosophy. Practically it offers Lisp goodness, jvm/js interop and a well-designed set of persistent collections everyone and their dog uses, part of the reason why clj libraries tend to compose ver
139.
by vnorilo 5y ago
From [1] On processors that have a halt instruction that stops the CPU until an interrupt occurs, such as x86's HLT instruction, it may save significant amounts of power and heat if the idle task consists of a loop which repeatedly exe
140.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I'd like to support Firefox with a donation as I'm sure many others would, but I don't trust Mozilla foundation to allocate it to something that actually matters.
141.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Lisp is not necessarily functional. There's a lot of mutation in Common Lisp even if the community favors a functional style. I think the question is: how does Lisp function without garbage collecting cons cells? For one, I'm not
142.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I grew up eating meat twice a day and quite like the taste. I cut that to once a week (and ramping down) once I understood the co2 numbers. I have always been carless but was naive with regard to diet. Dairy is now the WIP. Turns out I also
143.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I think software is human expression. It can be a social good or a business driver. But it does not have to be. It can have no users, no IO or never run on a computer and still encode deep meaning. Does it need to be social to be useful ?
144.
by vnorilo 5y ago
It helps that Go has a surprisingly powerful handicap system [1] - being a casual player I was able to play meaningful matches against a clearly superior opponent with suitable starting advantage, something that I have never been able to en
145.
by vnorilo 5y ago
Seems like a fairly modest return for creating one of the first top performing vaccines for a global pandemic. Even if you disregard all the other mRNA R&D they do.
146.
by vnorilo 5y ago
True. Especially when guiding a team C# makes life hard because so much of immutability is by convention only. I suppose it will get better once we can move to C#9 with Records, but even so, some discipline is required.
147.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I don't know. I don't write functional because it's hard and I'm super smart, I write functional because it's easy and I'm lazy. I'm also not sure the example in TFA is much of an argument. From a glance l
148.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I have made a conscious effort to bring the language in my academic papers closer to the language I would actually speak. Part of that is writing in singular first person when that reflects reality. One of the hardest to write is "I be
149.
by vnorilo 5y ago
I think zero cost in this context means compile-time polymorphism (templates) instead of runtime polymorphism (virtual functions).
150.
by vnorilo 5y ago
You see, I'd like to write more of my software in Clojure (or any functionally inclined Lisp). If there was a really good interop story with a non-gc:d native lang I could do more of it. Clojure is a hosted language, so hosting it on C

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