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goldfire

74 karma · joined January 11, 2015

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goldfire··on Nobody's just reading your code
Rust's library documentation has this feature as well; each item has a [src] link that takes you straight to the code being documented; see for instance [0], and you'll find the link to the right side of the heading. This even works for crates not in the standard library because it's actually a feature provided by rustdoc, the standard documentation generator; for example, you can get to the source for functions in serde (the most popular Rust serialization library) directly from its documentation [1].

[0] https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/vec/struct.Vec.html#method.tru...

[1] https://docs.serde.rs/serde_json/ser/fn.to_string_pretty.htm...

goldfire··on Why is Rust difficult?
The thing that kept me from trying Ada (back a couple of years ago when I was writing firmware and so was kind of on its home turf) was a lack of good resources for learning it. I got a copy of the book "Programming in Ada" by Barnes, and did not find it very helpful. Often the advice seems to be to go read the Reference Manual, which I agree is highly readable for a language standard, but it's not aimed at users of the language. If anyone here has any other resources to recommend, I'd be happy to hear about them.
goldfire··on Proving that Android’s, Java’s and Python’s sorting algorithm is broken (2015)
Unless I misunderstand their test code, the article says they could reproduce the problem using an array of 67108864 Integer objects. That doesn't sound like an impossible amount of memory.
goldfire··on GObject
To clarify the above, new API's introduced since around Vista are more likely to be COM (and WinRT is of course entirely COM when used from C++), but the existing C API's have not been replaced, and some new C functions have been added since then as well.
goldfire··on Give me 15 minutes and I'll change your view of GDB (2015) [video]
In Visual Studio 2017 you can open an executable directly and begin debugging it without having either of those things.
goldfire··on Mozilla’s Send makes it easy to send a file from one person to another
The only items I have in that sharing menu are e-mail, which clearly there would be no need for this service if that were good enough, OneNote, which makes no sense, and advertisements for Store apps that I don't want to use. I think it's safe enough to say that menu does not replace a service like this.
goldfire··on Kerbal Space Oddities
Console dev kits for major platforms never included game engines, and the primitives included with older console dev kits, if any, were often ignored because more custom versions were required to get the desired performance.

What's happened to the console ecosystem is a whole bunch of different things. More accessible tools (e.g. Unity) and platform holder development programs have gotten more developers who are less experienced and not as well funded onto the console platforms. Availability of easy online patching has lead to physical releases, which have to be finalized months before the actual release date, being intentionally left incomplete, with gaps to be filled in by a release day patch. Changing technology cycles have made console generations blurrier. And yes, online DRM has become a thing, although I'm not sure that's quite as onerous in practice as you suggest; it's not like current consoles just refuse to run any games while offline.

That's not an exhaustive list. The appeal of consoles is what it has always been, they're still the easiest and cheapest way into modern video games. But it's true that some of the advantages over the PC platform have begun to erode.

goldfire··on I Almost Left Tech Today
Let me see if I understand this argument (with the awareness that you are attempting to restate it and not directly advocate it yourself).

When someone is being subjected to abuse in what is supposed to be a professional setting, the correct strategy for them is to take matters into their own hands and probably begin a disruptive and draining conflict which they are almost certain to lose in the end because the deck is stacked against them. Under absolutely no circumstances should the victim ask for assistance, because that would demonstrate weakness and a lack of self-respect. If only the victim had better strength of character, they could put those assholes in their places and nothing like this would ever happen again.

I really don't think I can make myself see the world that way. I don't think I want to.

goldfire··on Building the XNU kernel on macOS Sierra
Game engine vendors also care a great deal about iOS, since they have a large number of customers who do, so that's also driving support for Metal in those engines.
goldfire··on It's been 191 days since Google Drive worked for me
In any kind of user-facing support role, not trusting the user's account of what happened is rule #1.
goldfire··on Show HN: Crown – A flexible game engine written from scratch in C++
There was an attempt at a somewhat standardized C++ subset called Embedded C++. Even within embedded circles I don't think it ever got much traction, presumably because it was _too_ limited.
goldfire··on Facebook’s Safety Check is a stress-inducing flip of social norms
If we're talking about mobile apps, it seems more likely that they would send the same software to everyone and just turn on these features being tested by sending some activation signal from a central coordinating service, or perhaps including it in some web content that the app might use. That seems much easier than actually distributing different apps.
goldfire··on The Konami exodus
It's much too early in that project to publicly say anything substantive about it, because everything is still subject to change. All they can do right now is generate hype, which those trailers have done an admirable job of.
goldfire··on The future of MDN: a focus on web docs
MSDN has this, and I have never seen a comment there that actually provided value to a reader of the page. It makes even less sense on MDN, because MDN is a wiki; if you think something is missing, you can get it added.
goldfire··on MoonScript, a programmer friendly language that compiles to Lua
No source code, but looking at the Windows binary it's using a statically linked copy of SDL 2.

Plus that file's about 2 MB, so really not surprisingly small.

goldfire··on Remotely Exploitable Type Confusion in Windows 8, 8.1, 10, Windows Server, etc
We're only talking about one exploit in one program. CFG doesn't have to be "common" to be relevant, it just has to have been used in that program, which it must be or it wouldn't have been mentioned.
goldfire··on Windows Is Bloated, Thanks to Adobe’s Extensible Metadata Platform
This is exactly what Microsoft were accused of doing to Lotus 1-2-3 back in the day. See [0]. TL;DR: wasn't true.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10432608

goldfire··on Using Rust in Windows
There's a feature called Lightweight Solution Load [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/...] which does seem to just lazily load projects.

But even with that turned off, opening large solutions is vastly faster than in VS2015.

goldfire··on Faster 3D rendering with WebGL 2.0
DX 9 class graphics are great for a lot of applications. Not every project has to be at the cutting edge of rendering technique to achieve its goals.
goldfire··on Brilliant Jerks Cost More Than They Are Worth
It's hard to feel respected when you're constantly hearing all about how "fucking stupid" your ideas are. I know in theory you're supposed to separate criticism of your ideas from criticism of you, but in reality that isn't always easy when the statements being made are so strong.
goldfire··on Apple proposes new web 3D graphics API
They don't need to support it, because the GPU vendors have done so in their drivers, so it works fine on Windows without Microsoft's assistance.
goldfire··on Firefox Hardware Report for Web Developers
FYI, this default has been flipped on Nightly, and that change should make it in to the version 53 release in April (barring any huge problems found in the 64-bit build).
goldfire··on How to grow into your best developer self
The list in this article isn't exhaustive, it's just one set of suggestions. They are good and useful suggestions, but not the only possible criteria. You should make your own individual decisions based on the priorities and goals you have for your own life; nobody can tell you what is most important to you. What is it that you really want to accomplish? What are you willing to sacrifice to get there, and is that more or less than what you would actually have to sacrifice?

Keep an eye out for unintended consequences; keep digler999's reply in mind, for instance. But also don't overanalyze; whatever decision you make at this point probably won't be permanent.

goldfire··on Writing C software without the standard library
> Unfortunately the Windows syscalls are not officially documented and even less stable than on Linux, changing even between service packs.

You can get pretty close though; it's possible to skip the C runtime and most of the other user space libraries and call into ntdll directly. Many of the functions it exports are fairly thin wrappers over the system calls.

goldfire··on Golang dev.ssa branch merged into tip
So... not been closely following development on Go. What does this mean?
goldfire··on What Killed Smalltalk?
Are you suggesting those as counterexamples? Neither one is an example of an "all-encompassing environment."

"Visual C++" no longer exists, it's just part of Visual Studio now. When it did exist, it was merely an IDE for regular C++, not any kind of separate environment.

Visual Basic was a package including a GUI toolkit, a programming language, and an IDE for developing ordinary Windows applications. These tools were deployed and used as ordinary Windows applications. There was no separate computing environment with its own windowing system, data storage mechanisms, UI conventions, etc. And the current Visual Basic .NET isn't even that anymore; it's just another .NET language now, where you can swap out the IDE or GUI framework for whatever is available (including none at all if you like, you don't need either one to have a useful VB.NET program).

goldfire··on Software bloat makes me sad
If I want to start Microsoft Word right now, here's what I have to do: I press the Windows key, type "word", press enter, and then wait for it to start. That entire process takes three seconds; I just timed it. Now that Word's been run once already, I can start it again in less than one second. That compares pretty favorably with the process of finding a floppy disk, inserting it, and then finally running a command on it (it's even worse if I don't remember the cryptic command name, because then I have to wait for the floppy's directory to be read). To say nothing of how much easier to deal with this "bloatfest" will be once I get it loaded, compared to your leaner alternative.
goldfire··on C++'s Rule of Zero
The rule is saying that a class which does explicit resource management should be doing only resource management and have no other behavior. In other words, only wrapper classes should manage the resource they wrap, and (ideally) no other resource management should exist. That keeps the management work out of the way of other classes.
goldfire··on How is Javascript used within the Spotify desktop application?
Something is wrong there. I just tried the same tasks on my system; from clicking the shortcut to the Browse view rendering was 5 seconds, the live search displays suggestions almost as fast as I can type more characters, and the full results appear within a second. I am running it off an SSD, but that's not enough to account for all that time. I don't have a guess what it is, but something else is going on.