indigoabstract

How hard can it be? It's only 30 papers.

Maybe someone should ask Chuck Norris how long it took him. Who wants to go first?

> What I wrote about is not GC. The other comments about reference counting also unfortunately completely miss the point I made.

I know. I mentioned the GC because of another comment and because reference counting and GCs are the two usual general ways (that I know of) for automating memory management. That's what I had in mind.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, arena allocators are most useful for categories of objects with similar lifetimes and are not in the fully automated category. Because if I have multiple arena allocators, I still have to manually assign an allocator when creating an object and also deal with the lifetimes of the allocators themselves.

Easier than allocating/deallocating individual objects in main memory with malloc, true, and probably more efficient, but still not fully automated, so in my mind they have different use cases.

But it's possible that I haven't really understood them, so if I'm mistaken about their use, please don't leave me in the dark. If that makes me look like a junior wannabe, I think I can take it. Even the people who know their stuff had some point when they didn't..

Yeah, I remember about that. It works well for Objective-C.

But since C doesn't have objects or messages, the best equivalent thing I can think of is for the C compiler to emit some type of signal on assignments and variables going out of scope.

I don't claim to know what's the best solution for adding automatic memory management to C, but I'm pretty sure a good one exists. And it would need compiler support for it to work.

The thing I like most about C is its simplicity, its minimalism and it being the interface of choice for other languages to talk to each other.

You can completely understand the language since it's so small and doesn't change much and (if you avoid complicated pointer expressions) that also helps with reading the code.

That said, I don't enjoy manual memory management, but I'd like a GC even less.

Arena allocators are useful, but since reference counting is the preferred general solution in C++, could something similar also work in C without taking away that minimalism? I think it might, but that is just my opinion.

Apparently only Clang so far.

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AttributeReference.html#cleanup

It's probably just me, but the somewhat forced laughs & smiles from the people talking to it make me feel uneasy.

But enough of that. The future looks bright. Everyone smile!

Or else..

That may be true, but if you see yourself as a butcher, naturally, you tend to see everyone else as meat. The OP's disregard for "dumb people" is pretty obvious.

I meant no lasting solution to inequality has been found so far, certainly not by using force/laws/coercion. Surprisingly, that doesn't seem to discourage certain people to keep trying that path.

> As radical as they might seem, calls for limits on wealth are as old as civilization itself.

Well, knowing that, one could reasonably wonder why they never succeed. Could it be something about human nature that prevents utopias and good intentions from working as planned?

I guess I was thinking about how a more regular/predictable business would usually be sold by its owners for a multiple of its yearly revenue, for example.

Would the same apply to unicorns? Probably not, because they're special.

Yes and since no one can accurately predict that, its valuation is based more on speculation, rather than what could be extrapolated from the numbers alone.

Which is probably a bit counterintuitive for most people. At least for me it was.

It was about reaching a certain stock valuation only, not the the profits.

Public companies are strange creatures. You'd expect a company's valuation to be proportionally tied to its revenue and profit, but it rarely is and Tesla is an extreme case of this.

You have a typo in the url. Otherwise, very interesting article!

I don't use Java much these days, but for some reason I find this project inspiring. If only because of the level of commitment to get it working.

I just wanted to say great job!

Yeah, interesting idea. You either pay up or read it in Latin..

Right. If someone could come up with a pill or something to maintain motivation and make all the bugs and hairy annoying details feel fresh again, just like the feeling of starting over, I would certainly part with my money. But there's no such thing unfortunately.

I've become wary of commenting on articles that mention the pros and cons of various languages, but I still find it strange that so many people are so strongly focused on what their favourite language can do (usually better than others), instead of the project they're working on. When it should be the other way around.

The joke he mentioned about having 50 engines written but only 5 games certainly rings true and I don't think the language is the main problem preventing people from getting their projects done..

> It ran! [...] This is probably the first time in history that a graphic artist has painted a functionally workable computer program by accident.

I think this truly deserves a CS Ig Nobel Prize, if there were one, for making people laugh and then making people think.

If it does have a noticeable impact, that would be surprising, a bit like going back to the days when 'inline' was supposed to tell the compiler to inline the designated functions (no longer its main use case nowadays).

Well, if you want to take what I said literally, it seems I need to explain..

My point is, he thought about it for some time before he was free to start the work, then he laid down the basics in less than a week, so he was able to start using Git to build Git, polished it for a while and then turned it over.

Here's an interview with the man himself telling the story 10 years later, a very interesting read:

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/blog/10-years-of-git-an...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History

Learning about programming through storytelling?

Well I'm not in the target audience, but I like the style and I feel it's a lot less intimidating (and more interesting) than a typical book on programming computers. Pretty neat!

If you can do that, sure. Architecting a clear design beforehand isn't always feasible though, especially when you're doing a thing for the first time or you're exploring what works and what doesn't, like in game programming, for example. And then, there are also the various levels at which designing and implementation takes place.

In the end, I find my mental picture is still the most important. And when that fades after a while, or for code written by someone else, then I just have to go read the code. Though it may exist, so far I haven't found a way that's obviously better.

Some thing I've tried (besides commenting code) are doing diagrams (they lose sync over time) and using AI assistants to explain code (not very useful yet). I didn't feel they made the difference, but we have to keep learning in this job.

Yeah, could be.. IIRC, he said he doesn't find version control and databases interesting. So he just did what had to be done, did it quickly and then delegated, so he could get back to more satisfying work.

I can relate to that.

I had the same thought as I read that line. I think he's actually describing Linus Torvalds there, who, legend has it, thought about Git for a month or so and when he was done thinking, he got to work coding and in six days delivered the finished product. And then, on the seventh day he rested.

But for the rest of us (especially myself), it seems to be more like an interplay between thinking of what to write, writing it, testing it, thinking some more, changing some minor or major parts of what we wrote, and so on, until it feels good enough.

In the end, it's a bit of an art, coming up with the final working version.

Yeah, I nagged my dad into buying a PC, after playing this (and Wolfenstein 3D) at a friend's house.

I still fire it up, every once in a while, at night, trying to recapture the mood of those early days.

That's largely true. Still, there seems to be a difference between what we think we want and what we actually want, but we can't usually tell the difference in the moment, only in hindsight.

Eventually we find out, because we stick to what we actually want and discard what we thought we wanted.

It would be interesting to know what type of people would find this game amusing..

Since I'm one of them, perhaps programmers?

Every time I read about these mind hacks that are supposed to transform your life and attitude, I'm reminded of the Novelty effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_effect

It's the best thing ever, until you get used to it, than it becomes the same old. Sometimes I think the human race is completely ruled by this effect, ever chasing the next new thing as it seems so much better than the boring old thing.

I think 'You elephant in a china shop' needs to be in there too, so everyone can be at peace.

Completely unrelated, but there supposedly was this "grunge speak" English being spoken the 90's:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunge_speak

https://www.kexp.org/read/2017/11/15/kexp-exclusive-intervie...

At least some people thought it was.