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Mark Russinovich (of Sysinternals fame), thinks Rust should be the non-GC language of choice moving forward.

https://twitter.com/markrussinovich/status/15719951172335042...

I’ll offer a perspective unrelated to pay: It’s a pain to start learning C++, and even after you do, older devs will roast the hell out of your code because your book/tutorials of choice forgot to mention a crucial (in their opinion) feature that you absolutely should/shouldn’t use! Not to mention you’ve only programmed on Mac/Linux so far & windows is totally different, has a different compiler, different ways to install libraries, different C++ standard features supported, etc.

I like C++, and tooling has come a long way, but it’s so much easier to download rust/Python/node and you’re basically set on every platform & immediately ready to go. NOW consider pay, and even someone enthusiastic about programming C++ will reconsider.

I really like Nord. Another color scheme that caught my eye recently that I hadn't seen before is Everforest [1]. I find it similar to Nord in that it's pleasant without being too intrusive/distracting. Hoping it gains some traction & gets some more integrations. I've been trying to get it working for C/C++ in CLion myself (but unsuccessful so far).

[1] https://github.com/sainnhe/everforest

Seems like a really great idea, and the few times I used ffmpeg I could have really benefited from this. That being said, I almost exclusively prefer email signup over Google sign-in.

I always enjoy reading about Zig advancements. I haven't developed anything substantial in Zig yet, but I'm very optimistic about the future of the language.

If you're curious to see a large Zig codebase, two significant projects are Bun [1] and TigerBeetle [2].

[1] https://github.com/oven-sh/bun

[2] https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle

This makes me hopeful that users will switch to Binary Ninja. I picked up Binja a while ago (because it’s actually affordable for an individual) & haven’t felt any need to return to IDA. There’s also Rizin which seems pretty robust from what I’ve seen (haven’t tried it myself), & of course there’s also Ghidra. IDA isn’t the only effective disassembler in town anymore.

I switched on the new UI yesterday and really enjoy it, personally.

On the very rare chance that I purchase a lottery ticket, it's almost always when the jackpot grows to an enormous sum that starts making headlines. I don't do this because of a cost-benefit analysis or anything like that. I don't expect to win regardless of the prize. I buy a ticket for fun. For a few days, I entertain the fantasy of winning & joke around with friends about the things I would do with it all.

D wasn’t on my radar until recently, when I was curious if there were any languages with C++ interop out of the box. The two languages I stumbled on were Nim & D, although they understandably have some caveats. After spending some time reading the docs, I’m really interested in trying out both, but especially D.

Side Note: Why don’t I ever hear about Nim anymore??? It’s version 1.68 (and presumably stable), has very approachable syntax, claims great performance, provides a package manager, and allows the GC to be turned off (much like Dlang). What gives?

Thanks for such a detailed response! At a glance it seems pretty interesting, and the performance is quite good too. I’ll have to toy with it for my next project.

What’s special about Racket? What makes it stand out compared to Lisp/SBCL/Scheme?

I recall a while back John Carmack tweeted about writing some project in Racket & it’s been vaguely on my radar lately.

I love seeing these community projects to reverse and/or update classic games. Disassemblers (& decompilers to an extent) are becoming so good and accessible that these kinds of projects are becoming more common.

Too late for what? C++ will continue to be used for decades.

Yeah I still prefer writing C++, but Cargo is so incredibly smooth

I would prefer if “the fine was so large we nearly went out of business overnight” to be the norm in these situations. The pricetag is so low that it might as well be encouragement to commit more crime in the future.

This looks great. How have you decided on what languages to add? What other languages will you consider in the future?

I don't mean to be rude, but 'Have kids' may be one of the single worst pieces of advice you could give someone who is "plagued with exhaustion and lack of motivation".

Completely agree

... again?

I'm hopeful for other alternatives like Zig too

Yes occasionally. I try to purchase most texts as PDFs to avoid the hassle of moving hundreds of lbs of books around, but will splurge on high quality physical texts.

The only issue is that there’s a lot of really high quality work out there! It’s hard to be picky.

This is quite literally already happening

In that case, you might be interested in this youtube playlist [1]. The uploader claims to be new to Rust and implements the entire book in it. I haven't watched it myself, but had it bookmarked at the recommendation of a friend.

[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy68GuC77sUTyOUvDhVboQoOl...

Once you finish the main book, there's a few free bonus chapters provided [1] that help you implement soft area lights, bounding boxes (AABB in this case), and texture mapping. Beyond that, you might be interested in the "One Weekend" series [2], which is all C++ but is mostly general enough for other languages. There's also PBRT [3] which is an open source textbook/documentation for the pbrt-v3 renderer [4], but this is beyond the scope of "small exercise" territory. Good luck!

[1] http://www.raytracerchallenge.com/#bonus

[2] https://raytracing.github.io/

[3] https://pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/contents

[4] https://github.com/mmp/pbrt-v3

+1 for rustlings, which also inspired "ziglings" [1]. Both of these were great resources for quickly & easily learning the basics of their respective languages.

[1] https://github.com/ratfactor/ziglings

I typically write a raytracer while attempting to stick to a small set of "best-practices" for the language I'm trying to learn. I also use this exercise from time-to-time to test new language features (for example C++20 ranges/coroutines recently).

I also recommend this same exercise to others through the book "The Ray Tracer Challenge" [1] by Jamis Buck, because it describes an entire implementation of a raytracer in pseudocode. Beginners mostly just need to plug-in their language of choice & still end up with a satisfying visual result. Experienced programmers can extend it by adding the ability to load non-trivial .obj models, which will necessarily motivate adding concurrency, bounding volumes, & other general performance improvements.

I'm planning on tackling it again in Elixir soon, which should be fun & interesting.

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention the free bonus chapters [2] that get you started on bounding volumes (AABB), soft area lights, and texture mapping.

[1] https://pragprog.com/titles/jbtracer/the-ray-tracer-challeng...

[2] http://www.raytracerchallenge.com/#bonus

I’m hopeful that this will be a good thing for high-quality educational content. Udemy, as an alternative, is largely poor quality content scams that have fake reviews and outrageous prices (so that the seemingly constant “sales” encourage you to purchase). If YouTube can improve on this experience even a little bit then it’s a success in my eyes.

The Ergodox EZ is my secondary keyboard, while my primary is a Keebio Iris [1]. I've used them heavily for years, and highly recommend both.

[1] https://keeb.io/collections/iris-split-ergonomic-keyboard

I disagree with their premise that Reels is "performative" while TikTok is "authentic". They could have cherry picked other sample posts to demonstrate the exact opposite.

They're both equally performative & inauthentic.

They're totally right, it's so fast that I assumed it was static.