5,692 karma · joined October 28, 2014
The safety of LLVM and GCC need not be a priority... they're not normally exposed to untrusted input. Also, it's a particularly hard area because the safety of generated code matters just as much as the safety of the compiler itself. However Cranelift is an interesting option.
No silver bullet here unfortunately... but writing new infrastructure in C or C++ should mostly be illegal.
Look at it this way --- mature products like Chrome are already doing all of that wherever they can. If it was enough, they wouldn't worry about C++ UB anymore. But they do.
Almost the same argument applies to Edge and Chrome.
Russia's nuclear arsenal is a perfectly adequate guarantee of Russia's security. Putin knows this, which is why he's happy to leave Russia's western border with NATO practically undefended while he pursues Ukraine. (This also disproves the "Putin invaded Ukraine because he's afraid of NATO" lie.)
It's more plausible that Putin's survival depends on the outcome of the Ukraine war. But "mad Putin blows up the world" is as much a problem for the Russians as anyone else.
In Firefox, in my era at least, a reviewer who simply ignores a review request indefinitely was not doing their job and would get yelled at by someone --- me, if it came to my attention.
Firefox and Chromium's bespoke tools have their pluses and minuses but they're a lot easier to deal with that the kernel "workflow".
> You think you know better. But the current process works.
Regardless of how badly broken the kernel development process is, Linus and others observe that Linux continues to dominate and conclude that therefore the development process "works". Success in the market blinds the successful vendor to their defects. Sound familiar?
If Linux carries on down this path then eventually something else that has been subject to more evolutionary pressure will displace Linux, and we'll all be telling stories about how Linux got complacent and how it was obvious to everyone they were heading for a fall.
And honestly, with maintainers like Hellwig maybe that's what needs to happen.
Suppose you find a bug in the kernel and come up with a patch. You email the patch to some kernel mailing list and ask for feedback. Typically, you will receive no response whatsoever, because no-one is responsible for responding. You can try emailing random developers and eventually maybe one of them will have mercy on you.
In Firefox and I think Chromium, you can file a bug, attach your patch, request review from someone (the UI will help you choose a suitable person), and it's their job to respond.
I don't know what this is about. In my experience, refactorings that change the semantics of APIs are much easier in Rust than in C. E.g., change assumptions about the lifetimes of pointers passed into APIs: the Rust compiler will tell you where you need to change anything; the C compiler will happily compile your code and you'll corrupt memory at runtime.
I find it hard to understand how $60K means no motivation but $100K would be highly motivating.
> I'd like to put more money towards things I care about.
You said later that you care about the public health system and helping the elderly. That's where a large percentage of our taxes go.
> Huh? Dividends are income. Or are you talking about the non-monetary rewards of owning a business?
No, I'm talking about selling all or part of the business. I agree with you that it's a problem our businesses often sell out to overseas interests who hollow out the company. But the general pattern of making most of your money by selling shares in the business is completely normal worldwide.
The income tax rate isn't all that relevant to the costs and benefits of starting a company, so I don't understand that part of your story. The rewards for founding a successful company mostly aren't subject to income tax, and NZ has a very light capital gains regime.
I have started my own company and I do agree that there are some issues that could be addressed. For example, it would be fairer if the years I worked for no income created tax-deductible losses against future income.
But NZ's tax rates are lower than Australia and the USA and most comparable nations, and NZers start a lot of businesses, so I don't think that is one of our major problems at the moment.
Real wages in all income brackets are at an all-time high (apart from a short blip during the pandemic), and overall have surged since the start of the pandemic. See e.g. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-full-tim....
China's rule of law is generally very weak. "Ultimately, no matter what the laws say, it would be difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement, and the courts cannot be relied on to provide a remedy." https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/what-the-national-intel...
This is particularly obvious with the number of senior executives of key Chinese companies who have simply disappeared, at least temporarily, when they displeased the government. Again, nothing comparable in the USA (yet).
The situation has waxed and waned but in general West Germany and Japan at the government level have been pretty happy to have US troops stationed there while facing off against the Soviet Union (now Russia) and China. The Ukrainians and the Baltics would love to have some US troops stationed there right now.