forrestthewoods

What is the lockup schedule?

Great explanation. This affirms my biases that shell scripting and everything-is-strings is a mistake. Horrific.

I think both are problematic.

I think even if C++ had a periodic ABI break that even a better std::regex spec is fundamentally wrong.

As someone who ships cross-platform I never ever want different platforms to have different implementations for things that are not actually platform specific. Having different implementations of std::string depending on if I’m on windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, PlayStation, Xbox, or Nintendo is a profoundly terrible thing to do.

locale is a great example of a concept that is catastrophically bad, provides zero value, and shouldn’t exist at all in the spec.

std::regex is so worthless that no one uses it. My codebase gives CI warnings when it’s used. so it’s not even really a problem. It is indicative of a larger problems.

> C++'s separation of spec from implementation is clearly functional.

Your bar of “clearly functional” is is not a compelling or meaningful bar. What a weird fallacy.

C++11 was pretty great and meaningfully modernized the language. The amount of useful good things in each following release got smaller and smaller. Maybe just one or two useful improvements in C++20. Almost nothing in C++23. And now C++26 has failed to pass. It’s grinding to a halt. The biggest recent features such as concepts and modules have been catastrophic failures.

Those failures aren’t all due to my specific complaint of “battery specs are a bad idea”. But “functional” is the lowest possible bar. And one could argue that as a whole isn’t being met.

The difference is that I can trivially write a std::deque container that runs under any compiler that implements the C++ spec.

Why on earth would I want a different implementation of std::deque on each platform I use because the compiler team needed to provide one? It’s madness!

I think the language committee should provide a spec where required (OS filesystem, mutex, etc). And when it is not required they should simply provide a plain bog standard library.

There is absolutely no reason for std::deque to be a specification. The committee should either ship a committee library for std::deque or they should leave it to the community. They can provide a battery or they can not. Providing a spec for a battery that is both over and under specified is the absolute worst possible choice.

No. The problem isn’t that std::regex is slow and badly designed. It’s that std::regex exists at all.

C++ is unique in that it defines a spec for STL but not implementation. The result is something that is both overspecified and underspecified.

Including batteries is fine. Including a spec for what the batteries should look like is such a profoundly bad idea that no other major language does it.

> just so convenient

Is it? At this point I associate Docker with slow build times and later upon layers of abstraction to try and cache and make it not slow. But it’s a never ending battle.

I can’t run Isaac Lab on my work cloud VM because the system has glibc2.34 instead of 2.35. The only way to hack around this is to move everything into Docker. So now there’s a big huge convoluted build process just because I changed a line of code. It’s utterly miserable with no redeeming qualities.

Again none of this is Docker’s fault. But the fact that Linux is so incapable of running software that Docker needs to exist is damning.

For reference Docker is not popular on Windows because Windows can simply run software programs without requiring Docker.

Yet for some reason people think Linux is a good platform for developers. It is bewildering…

> there hasn't been much of an issue around it. I think most developers have come around to the idea that it increases game sales.

Cloud gaming is too small to be relevant in any way. That’s why it’s ignored.

One of my deeply unpopular opinions is that Docker only exists because Linux as a bad operating system that is incapable of deploying Docker. I have not once worked on a project where “we’ll solve this with Docker!” didn’t result in never ending Docker fixes and workarounds and hacks.

This is not a slight on Docker itself. It’s a slight on the conditions that induced Docker to exist.

One of the great selling points of one of my projects is “this is easy to run without needing Docker”.

Dams and hydro are renewable energy. But they sure ain’t “clean” energy.

> Learning git was difficult, and the more they learned the more they discovered they had more to learn, including the little things, obscure details and a plethora of paper-cuts. For them (again, I suspect they are a majority), the perspective of learning something else comes with the expectation of a similar daunting effort and steep cognitive reluctance.

You just blew my mind with this. This is shockingly profound.

I am delighted to hear this. Please do not forget support for Windows.

Let me share with you my previous screeds on this topic:

* https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-... * https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/using-zig-to-commit-too...

They’re semi-adjacent in that they are about build systems that don’t suck. (buck2 is also mostly TheWay but also not usable outside of Meta and has room for improvement).

Save us from Git and CMake Steve! Please I beg you!!

> [Git/GitHub] achieved a local maxima around 2012, and has been holding the industry back since :(

I agree so hard. It’s inertia is too strong and we’ve stalled progress for a decade.

I really really wish Sapling could be used externally. It is by-and-large TheWay.

Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI. It’s fantastic. People who only use Git really don’t understand how much better things can be.

There's a dead comment asking about the use of the term "clean room". I'm not sure why. I am not entirely certain that deeply analyzing super detailed traces qualifies as "clean room".

yes and? someone sharing the details of an extremely popular project is super cool. comments like this will not encourage more people to share more cool things.

I'd be ecstatic if more people used AI to share more cool things they've done. that'd be awesome. more of this blog post please.

Strongly disagree with your sentiment.

> You don't know that they didn't read it!

If someone sends me AI slop to read then I am going to assume and behave as if they didn’t read it until proven otherwise.

It is the responsibility of the sender to proactively say “I read this and stand by it as at least mostly correct and reasonable”.

They are also free to say “AI slop have not yet proof read”. Then I have an informed choice.

If there is any cartel that deserves to be broken its legal search. May they die a miserable death.

You can outsource your work to AI. You can even outsource your thinking. But you can never ever outsource your understanding.

Yeah Git is super mediocre. But the hypothesis is that you could build something that doesn’t suck!

Yes it would require a global blob store across reps. That seems like a good design choice.

I don’t know what you mean by “ won't work for version control databases, assuming use of a distributed VCS.”

Deduping files is easy.

Literally not impossible. And also not tens of gigabytes.

> virtual filesystems everywhere

Please universe I beg you.

Git is incredibly mediocre. But it's all most people know. It's a version control tool that can't handle binary files; and no GitLFS does not count. The end result is a version control tool that is unable to actually version control all the things you need for a project.

This results in a Meta VCS layer where a ton of critical assets are stored in Docker files and other misery. If you want to re-compile a project for 2015 then good luck and god speed.

Personally I think full toolchains belong in source control. And that you should be able to clone / materialize a repro, yank your network cable, and build. This is how big tech monorepos work. It is TheWay imho.

Threw $10 at this to help me prepare for my league’s fantasy auction this weekend. It spend $3.50 and then said “this action would cause you to go above your spending limit”.

Then I threw $100 for a Codex Max sub and it included Astra and it did it for me.

Sure seems like Astra is expensive AF.

I don’t understand. I don’t know what “added the G to their UI” means.

Also sounds like they added back the keyboard support so there’s literally no issue?

> In excess of 10k, I'm sure.

Sure sounds like you got your moneys worth.

> Shallow clones are awful. Run your own damn mirror if you're going to do something nasty like that.

TIL shallow clones are expensive. That's wild to me. It's supposed to be cheaper!

I have a really dumb ignorant question.

What is a data plane? What is a control plane? I don’t genuinely understand what these words mean :(

5 years? Bruh. There’s no way from scratch it would take 5 years.