jclay

Thanks for sharing, that was an interesting read. I know the IO performance has always been the main gripe with WSL.

It makes me think more broadly about some of the trade offs with the discussions that happen on Github Issues.

It’s great that insights like this get pulled out in the discussions, and this could serve as excellent documentation. However, the discoverability will be difficult and it always takes some weeding through the low quality comments to piece the insights from contributors together.

I wonder how Github (and Microsoft) could better handle this. They could allow for flagging in-depth comments like this into a pinned section and they could be updated collaboratively in the future (Wiki?).

It also feels like a reputation system could help to motivate healthier discussions and could bury low quality “me too” comments and gripes. It’s not so bad in the linked example but I often encounter many rude comments aimed against volunteer OSS developers.

But now you can do it with opensource firmware.

Wow, I'm excited to dig into this.

Crazy to imagine that you could buy a _Microsoft_ Surface, strip Windows and replace with Debian and have a fully open source device.

This raises my odds that they open source the Windows Kernel from ~2% to 4%.

For this reason, I'm beginning to think that we do in fact have "universal" healthcare in that anyone can turn up to the hospital and be treated despite their income. For those who don't pay (or don't have insurance) the hospital spreads that cost out over their other patients and likely marks up the price to insure against non-payment. So we end up with an unregulated mess where any one hospital has to insure themselves (in the form of passing on costs) against the percentage of patients that will simply never pay.

Given that this is going on, why not just switch to a single payer system and spread this out over a much larger population rather than each hospital trying to insure against it?

There's so much that _feels_ misleading here.

Paragraph before the chart:

"The benefits we’ve found typically range from a 30 percent better ratio to 3x better speed."

In what cases? What methodology was used to evaluate this? I certainly expected a scientific (honest) treatment of how the performance was evaluated and the corresponding trade-offs to follow on at some point.

Great, thanks! Last question.

On the blog you mention you are underway porting the internal code to replace Zlib with Zstd. Is there a reason you decided not to use the wrapper as a first pass to migrate all uses of Zlib to Zstd across the entire codebase?

That sounds fantastic. What is the porting process generally like? Are there any possibilities to create an API compatible wrapper to make it a drop in replacement for zlib?

That being said, can anyone able to decode this share some cases in which this would be better suited than zlib?

I find the first chart so hard to understand. The axes need labels, and the color scheme is not ideal. They should use different line styles, and add a caption below summarizing the findings. There's a reason journals often require graphs to be formatted this way.

This is a resource I've found helpful: https://www3.nd.edu/~pkamat/pdf/graphs.pdf

"Consider readers with color blindness or deficiencies"

"Avoid colors that are difficult to distinguish"

Exact same thing happened to my friend. He did all his research, and while he was under anesthesia a nurse assisted that was out of network. $5k out of pocket. He ended up getting it removed after some run around between insurance and the hospital.

Regarding your first thought, you can get pretty close today with Windows Isolated App Containers. Chromium uses this under the hood.

Correct. IIRC,Cosmetic adblocking is also not possible without adding uBlock.

I guess one advantage with their approach is that they’re doing their network filtering “closer to the metal” from what i’ve seen from a recent look at their codebase. If they’re able to block requests by bypassing the extensions API, it’s likely faster. They can probably also achieve some parallelism here since requests are done in multiple processes. If you can simply hook in and block a site, you likely eliminate several layers of IPC messages to the extension.

I really don’t think they’re giving this a fair treatment.

From what i gather, they switched from Muon which looks to be an Electron that uses later versions of Chromium. This version also had a custom UI written entirely in web technologies.

They’re comparing that to their new version based directly on the Chromium code base + some privacy related patches. Their UI changes are now mostly relegated to a bundled extension so it looks and feels like Chrome.

It seems they could have dug a bit deeper to find out where the speed up actually came from. The chromium build system is incredibly complex but very specially tuned to produce maximum performance for a specific configuration (Google Chrome Branded Release). When you go in trying to use bits and pieces of Chromium as dynamic libraries, things can go south rather quickly for performance. It could also mean that GPU acceleration or sandbox configurations differed between their modified Chromium versions they’re comparing here. Was LTO enabled on both builds?

Either way, It feels like they’re taking claim for developing some browser performance increase of what is in all likelihood solely attributable to the Chromium project.

Nice tip! I've also been watching the Godbolt.org progress improving LLVM IR support which could also be helpful for interactively exploring IR generation.

The results are pretty good today if you select Clang compiler and pass `-emit-llvm` flag.

That's a good point. Most of the large LLVM projects I've used (such as Root's Cling) seem to lag behind LLVM's versions rather drastically.

My list is mostly C++ focused, but the LLVM tooling for clang-tidy/clang-query is also worth a mention. There are a big set of refactors that you can apply across your codebase if you wanted to migrate to new C++ features for example. You can also write your own if you wanted to refactor to use the API of an updated dependency for example. It's a lower-level version of Javascript's "codemods" for C/C++.

There's some work being done to build some tooling around interactively creating AST matchers and applying refactors across an entire codebase. [0]

[0] https://steveire.wordpress.com/2018/11/11/future-development...

For those who haven't explored LLVM, it's an incredibly powerful technology and rather approachable for getting started with.

A few of my favorite LLVM discoveries:

- If you want to build Clang (LLVM C/C++ Compiler), it's really simple to pull down and build with little external development tooling (only a compiler and CMake). Shown here [0].

- You can pull LLVM/Clang master and use that for a "bleeding-edge" toolchain with a high degree of stability. [0].

- Clang is used to compile Chromium and Firefox on all platforms. Both have seen great performance gains from Clang's link time optimization. [1] [2]

- Klee is built on LLVM infrastructure and is used for automatic generation of test cases. [3] See some of their papers for how powerful their results are.

- Clang can now produce ABI compatible binaries with MSVC and has support for the Visual Studio debugger. [4]

- Lots of interesting research projects leveraging LLVM [5]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZI_Qla4pNA

[1] http://blog.llvm.org/2018/03/clang-is-now-used-to-build-chro...

[2] https://glandium.org/blog/?p=3888

[3] https://klee.github.io

[4] http://blog.llvm.org/2017/08/llvm-on-windows-now-supports-pd...

[5] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2017&q=LLVM&hl=en&...

I don't know, I have a hard time finding sympathy for this.

I've paid many thousands of dollars towards courses to get my degree from a top university and most of them were awful. As with any university, there's of course no way to get a refund or make any public complaints that would yield an outcome.

I've been switching between Firefox and Vivaldi as of late and continue to be impressed with Vivaldi. Just tested the pop-out video feature and it works great. Looking forward to using this for lecture videos.

I was looking into something like this in order to port a POSIX-only program to run on Windows.

Does anyone know how to link in native OpenGL system libraries? I'm looking to link to native graphics libraries so that I don't have to pass through Emscripten's OpenGL -> WebGL emulation layer. I'd like to drop the browser render layer all together and just have GLFW or SDL take care of rendering native client windows.

Try reaching out to professors or research labs at universities. I work with a professor who would love to hire more Software Engineers with industry experience. It is by far the most meaningful and interesting work I've done in my career.

There are tons of interesting projects going on within academia that unfortunately don't take advantage of any software engineering best practices. Many projects are prototypes hacked together in MATLAB and I know in our lab we are looking to build more robust products that are open source and extensible for other researchers to use.

Follow up question: What do you do about health insurance? The cheapest (read: catastrophic coverage) on Oscar is several hundred per month last time I checked.

I was wondering the same. I wonder where this falls if the EU resident is using a VPN. It'd likely still be on the site owner to prove that were the case.

How would one manage to sidestep GDPR responsibilities? If it made sense, could you opt to block EU based IP addresses? You'd also have to ensure that any past data you have is cleansed of EU based users which could be tricky.

This is great, but does anyone else find themselves avoiding Medium articles? The overlay "Pardon the Interruption" modal and the cluttered mobile experience are really getting old.

We've been using vcpkg on Windows and it's really made the process of managing c++ dependencies far less painful. Great to see this coming cross-platform as we can now simplify the dependency section of our install guide to one line.

vcpkg install boost cgal [etc...]

Their team has also been super friendly and responsive on Github. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

This comes at a good time as it's something I've been looking for. We have a physics engine and we want to allow users to write custom c++ functions that can be linked in at run-time. We'd like to allow our users to swap in their own custom integration or timestep methods for example.

As an aside, do you know if it is possible to use this to JIT C++ for CUDA kernels?

Is anyone else clear on what this article is saying? Being able to call AWS services from a cloud based IDE is going to "Devour the Software Industry"?

I suppose I should clarify that I'm referring to the data being used to classify me into various (increasingly specific) categories and that resulting output being sold to the highest bidder in the form of a targeted advertisement. Dropbox I'm less familiar with, so I can't speak to their model.

There's not a great way unfortunately. I just switched all of my accounts that send transactional emails (Amazon receipts, Uber, etc) over to iCloud and then forwarded my old Gmail. There's no turn-key method I'm aware of, but It was important to me that I could have my purchase and trip logs stored somewhere that respects my privacy.