marklacey

And then what do you do when you upgrade compilers and the build starts failing?

This isn’t a hypothetical, it happens in real life. Your only option at that point is roll back compilers and hope someone cares about the regression enough to fix it.

The point is the better model is to build the semantics into the language rather than relying on the whims of implementation.

Of course the semantic guarantees will likely be somewhat weak because of differences in ISAs, memory hierarchies, etc.

I only barely skimmed the post and the follow-on posts so this is less about that and more about autovectorizers.

Autovectorization is the wrong approach for data-parallelization. You don’t want to rely on a brittle unpredictable code transformation for performance in this case. You want to bake it into the programming model.

ispc uses this approach and it results in performance predictability to a large degree. You can imagine other approaches as well, like explicitly data-parallel loops, or a declarative approach.

Most of these (and the GPU data-parallel models) rely to a very large extent on the programmer to manage data dependencies to ensure correctness.

Glad to see Fran Allen on the list.

I remember reading (in the early 90's) several papers authored or co-authored by "F.E. Allen" and having no clue "F.E." was a woman until a few years later.

I was in a compiler workshop several years ago and when I looked up I realized she was sitting directly in front of me at the workshop. I believe she was retired at the time but still attending conferences out of personal interest.

It was first released in VC++ in 2002.

I don’t recall if HP actually shipped it, but I know they had a tech report or research paper around 1994 that did LTO.

I have a vague recollection that DEC may have shipped it in the 90s as well.

> The Financial Clearance system combines medical records along with the financial records Experian already has on you to calculate the score.

How is this not a complete violation of HIPAA?

Are they working around it by having very general HIPAA release forms?

Long ago I spent a week at a compiler workshop (on what was then the relatively new SSA form) and one of the other attendees worked on the occam compiler.

He told me about the language over dinner and it seemed really interesting but I think he left me with the impression at the time that it was not for mainstream everyday programming.

Yet as others have pointed out, CSP has survived and is now embodied in ‘go’.

Avoid toxic people and drama.

There are people who want to focus on everything wrong around them, and tend to amplify it and create drama. If you find yourself around people like this try to create some distance or cut them out of the picture entirely. If you find that you’re always surrounded by people like this take some time to try to figure out how and why that is happening.

To take this a step further, you really want to find great managers and avoid average ones. Managers who take the time to get to know you, know what motivates you, run teams that are collaborative, shield you from nonsense but provide visibility for you, believe in work/life balance, are fair and challenge you and your team.

Without this you may do okay but you won’t grow as quickly as you might otherwise and may find that you are spinning in place.