ilkhd2

Yes, Amazon is behaving surprisingly. First surprise was Kindle, second - vegetables. Now - this.

Of course... Nokia, ericsson - the are scandinavian, are not they?

the forgot this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Europe.svg

BTW, a lot more close Toronto use it's river to cool air in AC units in office buildings.

Agree with only one point (more availible drivers). Developer mindshare - irrelevant point, from the point of view of non-kernel related development, FreeBSD an Linux are very same. Higher performance? - not sure. Proven terchnology on netbooks? - well netbook i just a small PC, nothing to prove IMHO.

Still can not understand why Linux is _obvious_ choice for Chrome... *BSD are just fine. Apple agrees with me.

I do not think that is gonna lead to something useful, people can fall into "chinese syndrome" syndrome, when a movie predicted what hapeened a week later...

Yet it is very chilling to read.

Eee... You can not do too much to boost Fox news today. No matter if you like (I do) or do not, the consumer want less of right-wing stuff. He'll probably invent something out of this scandal, but won't return "old good times".

So do you think that success of MacOS X (derived from FreeBSD)does not show benefitsof BSD model? Or Microsoft's use of NetBSD? And also, many developers put off by GPL( I am for example),

The objective reasons for being not as popular I think, that FreeBSD never positioned itself as a desktop system, and many small things (such as how fast it boots) are neglected. Yet, overall simplicity and order is attractive to me; a lo easier to understand internals IMHO.

Well, it is still better to provide people some access to search engine than none at all. If they would not agree, chinese government would close it altogether.

Well, that is why I watch Vimeo.Low-budget and good. And in general, that is very American way of thinking, that the best movies necessarily have to use most advanced technologies. For example, European movies are often low-budget, yet better than Transformers or Twilight, or similar stuff.

Paranormal activity an Pi are dirty cheap, but nonetheless good movies. I mean expensive is not necessarily good.

If you really wanto to "go low level", I can recommend to write progs for NES(6502)/Genesis(68000) - the hardware is simple, processor - simple, and there is a plenty of open source emulators which are in fact a great documentation for target machine.

Modern PC's unfortunately are so complicated...

IMHO something went wrong in early 90-s. Quadra 700 looks better than 800.

Interesting to know AIDS and STD prevalence among these people.

Ramanujan is well known.

Not sure about patents in "traditional" industries, such as machinery, aviation - they may be indeed useful, but pharmaceutical and, our darlings, software patents are very harmful.

Even if they do not need a lot of optimizations, they still have to be fast. You would not like the performance would they be written in ruby.

And do not forget by the way that Ruby is a memory hog.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...

And I do not know where you saw me saying C is the ultimate language for making compilers. I never said that, I do not think so, I just said python/ruby are bad for the task.

Ok, the discussion is becoming pointless: you like ruby for compiler construction. Well I'd rather use a language with proper tail recursion, algebraic data types, with pattern matching as a part of it, fast, strongly typed [I beleive algebraic types with pat. matching gives roughly same possibilities as does dyn. typing, for this task], with standard or at least big industrial backing behind - such as F# or Haskell. And at the end of the day get warm feeling that my code is "green" - does not waste joules, by working fast.

I appreciate your choice, but I'd myself do differently.

Man, you are being difficult. Ruby is well known to be a very slow language (if you want numbers check http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32q/benchmark.php?test=al...). Optimizing compilers are computationally demanding tasks, and the proof (albeit extreme one) is Stalin Scheme compiler, that can take minutes to compile code, but the result is sometimes faster than C/C++ code, or at least on par. Now, this compiler is written either in Scheme itself or in C i do not remember, but definetelt not in ruby. If it take to compile your code a minute for a compiler written in [C/Stalin Scheme] it will take at least ten minutes for one written in ruby.

Very beautiful, touching and poetic.

You probably missed the point - my concern is not the speed of compilation _of_ _the_ _compiler_ _itself_ - it is totally irrelevant, what is important is the performance of _created_ _compiler_, which is going to be ok, taking into account the quality of Stalins optimizer.

No I did not, butI read papers, written by the author. Indeed it is slow, but still be good for final compilation. Alas it is r4rs, and also I heard that it sometimes generate incorrect code. Still Scheme is better choice in my opinion for performance sensitive code, than ruby/python.

Probably frontend can be taken from GNU Octave? Claims to be similar to Matlab...

What make you think that I think this way? Linux kernel is just an example of relatively big program, where performance of the compiler is an important issue.

Another example of performance-sensitive application of compilers is background Java compiler in Eclipse - even for rather small programs it has to be fast. Ruby is 10-100 (actually more than that) times slower than C/Java, So if you optimizer (wriiten in C/Java/Haskell) needs 0.5 second to optimize code, same code will need (by very optimistic measure) 30 sec. Python not much better. Scheme a bit better (especially Stalin compiler), Lisp almost good.

There many attempts to get proofs for compilers for popular languages, C or Ada for example: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1315602 http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/publi/compiler-certif.pdf

Of course it is true. And of course it does not make common sense - common sense usually made by brain/mind. If you cannot mirror properties of target machine - you cannot optimize code for that target - period. Any computatiuon made in compiler will be potentially different from the same, nonoptimized computation made in target. The more computations have been optimized in the compiler the bigger probabilty you'll get wildly different code.

However, if you do not have the target datatype you dealing with during compilation, you are destined to simulate them.

Example: ((unsigned char) 2) + ((unsigned char)255) = 1

That is in C. In ruby you'll have to manually check for overflow, and do it for each operation. You can invent classes all kind of things, but why? Use a language with types, and the check will be done for you by you Core Duo.

When you make optimization you need to do intermediate calclulation _exactly_ the same way the target machine does. Even if the number is ascii or unicode string, you need to do the computations strictly same way s target machine does, otherwise you'd break assumptions of the programmer, and lead to unreproducible code.

1. No not any. Many cross-compilers do not if the binary formats and pecularities of arithmetic operations maps well between host system and target system - why waste time? Example = x86 and x64, two different platforms, with same binary representation. About performance - not sure if it is negligible - optimisation takes a lot of time in moder compilers. 3. You have not seen ml code I am sure. ML has type inference, you are not bothered about types too much. And it has pattern matching, very good when traversing trees. Neither scheme nor pyruby has this. ML also a language with completely formalized semantics, in combination with strong type it allows you to prove that you compiler is correct by means of formal provers.