ibobev

Could someone explain, is there any advantage of producing a 130nm custom SoC compared to using a lower node FPGA for the same design?

In his talk "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk) Jonathan Blow is defending similar ideas.

Recently I browsed http://www.indieretronews.com/. This is a site with information about new games for old computers like Commodore 64, Amiga and so on, and also for retro styled indie games for modern systems. I even posted it to HN.

Are you planning to make it also work with Firefox? Does someone know, similar extension for Firefox?

It seems that it would. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoCore

What exactly is the "Broadcom proprietary part"?

A little out of topic question, but I'm curious is it possible to program Raspberry Pi on low level without OS, just like Arduino and if not, why?

The arrest of Meng seems to me like the Roman and Byzantine practice for taking hostages from families of foreign leaders to ensure their loyalty and obedience to their interests.

As always with such articles, this is also misleading. They do not explain that according to the "No-communication theorem" [1] it is not possible to use quantum teleportation for faster than light information transfer.

This is becoming very common in popular science articles to be represented some misleading propositions by avoiding to report a little, but important part of the whole picture. In this way many people (sometimes including myself) stayed with invalid picture for what is actually achieved or possible to achieve.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-teleportation_theorem

The single most feature I hate about their products is their reliance on JVM, which makes them memory hungry and slow on older machines. :)

As a developer I am keen to see some compilation benchmarks. Unfortunately those kinds of benchmarks are almost never included in such reviews. Instead there are many gaming benchmarks which purpose is not exactly clear for me, after obviously gaming is not the primary target market for R9 3950X.

> D can also use C and C++ libraries (including templates), and with gcc and llvm it covers pretty much all the same architectures/platforms as nim.

Thank you for the suggestion. It turns out to be correct. Obviously there is a huge amount of progress since the last times I had been looking at D, before more than 7 years. (https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html) Still the D way looks to me more inconvenient by requiring you to include the class internals into the D binding. Example from the D manual:

  extern(C++):
  struct Foo(T)
  {
    private:
    T field;

    public:
    @disable this();
    T get();
    void set(T t);
  }

Nim requires you only to mention the name of the class (template) and the public part of the interface which you actually going to use. Example from the Nim manual (https://nim-lang.org/docs/manual.html#importjs-pragma-import...).

  type StdMap {.importcpp: "std::map", header: "<map>".} [K, V] = object
  proc `[]=`[K, V](this: var StdMap[K, V]; key: K; val: V) {.importcpp: "#[#] = #", header: "<map>".}

  var x: StdMap[cint, cdouble]
  x[6] = 91.4

> with gcc and llvm it covers pretty much all the same architectures/platforms as nim

I am not sure whether they cover some really old platforms. By compiling to C you can target pretty much every platform which have a C89 standard conforming compiler.

A day ago I asked in the Dlang forum (https://forum.dlang.org/post/nmwinrjavfumvxffptxy@forum.dlan...) whether it is possible to develop in D for video game consoles, not only current generation which Remedy Games do for example, but also a few generations back. It turns out to not be completely clear, because maybe no one has tried it, but it was suggested that even if possible, probably it would require a considerable amount of tinkering. I don't know whether someone tried this in Nim but it seems to me, that by compiling to C89 or C++98, it would not be much an issue for every platform with a conforming compiler for these languages.

But, actually Nim compiles to C or very simplistic C++ without requiring you to write C, nor C++. For this reason there are no complications with the new C++ standards and even there is no requirement to understand C or C++. But you can easily use every C or C++ library (even the template ones) and the amount of good quality C and C++ libraries is really very huge. Almost every modern language has capabilities for linking to C, but with C++ the things are not so simple, because of the non standard ABI, across different compilers. With templates the things are becoming even more complicated. For now the easiest and the most reliable way to use C++ libraries from another language is to compile it to C++. Also by compiling to C or C++ you almost automatically cover every platform whether C or C++ compiler is available with very little special support required in the Nim compiler.

And what exactly is the bad thing about that?

> People are more willing to share an article than read it. :)

This are the links to the articles by Andrey Karpov in which he describes the errors he found in Chromium project and the libraries used by the Chromium project, using his static code analysis tool PVS-Studio:

memset: https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0553/

break: https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0554/

memory leaks: https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0555/

typos: https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0556/

untrusted data: https://www.viva64.com/en/b/0557/

Here is his post about all of this on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Code_Analysis/status/958629791988633600

This is from Jeff Preshing's post on Twitter https://twitter.com/preshing/status/952289083778269185

This is my implementation of the classical Pacman game which I wrote for programming interview in the game dev company.