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simon_void

52 karma · joined July 19, 2018

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simon_void··on Starcraft: Ashfall
nope, StarCraft factions (most likely) come from Warhammer40k. - the Zerg (and its hivemind) are a version of the Tyranids [1] - the Protoss are adapted from the Aeldari [2] - the Humans are, well, Humans. with the ghost units being adapted from Psykers [3] and Marines being adapted from the 40k Space Marines [4]

The rumour is that Blizzard wanted to make a Warhammer game, but Games Workshop - the owner of the Warhammer IP - pulled out of the deal, so Blizzard modified their game's universe a a bit and called it WarCraft and later took a similar approach with StarCraft.

[1] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tyranids

[2] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Aeldari

[3] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Psyker

[4] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Space_Marines

simon_void··on JetBrains Junie Local: An agent you own, not one you rent
I've read it again: Junie CLI has a Linux version, Junie Local doesn't.
simon_void··on JetBrains Junie Local: An agent you own, not one you rent
why is Junie local only available for Mac & Windows? Why not Linux?
simon_void··on I think I found a planet nobody knew existed. I used Claude Code to find it
regarding naming the planet, I'd vote for "Adrian".
simon_void··on The Two Factions of C++ (2024)
> Bun's recent migration to Rust which could be misinterpreted as an example supporting migrating to rust, but under the hood it's far from a success story.

Since you don't mention that this migration is basically executed agenticly by Claude, it seems like you attribute this troubled migration to Rust not being that good of an improvement after all. For me it doesn't seem that surprising that Claude autonomously translating hacky Zig (according to Andrew Kelly #1) to unidiomatic (way more unsafe code that usual) Rust didn't solve the issues that the original code base already had.

#1 https://andrewkelley.me/post/my-thoughts-bun-rust-rewrite.ht...

simon_void··on Google is its own worst enemy
less is more, I just want the plain old search experience I've had for 25 years so I stated paying for Kagi around a year ago. (Before that I used DuckDuckGo which still seems fine. They seem to also offer AI now, but it's not obnoxious like on Google.)
simon_void··on The limits of Rust, or why you should probably not follow Amazon and Cloudflare
Is the inclusion of synchronous interfaces a new thing? When I learned actix_web 2-3 years ago for some webservices at work, the documentation surely (at least) started of with async functions everywhere. Did that change? Were synchronous interfaces introduced later in the actix_web documentation? Or did everybody switch over to axum in the meantime and axum has synchrounous interfaces!? (I just checked and according to crates.io axum seems to have 8x the recent downloads of actix_web.) background: actix_web is still the only Rust webframework I have experience with
simon_void··on Don't trust AI agents
nobody trusts AI agents, that's why they are put in a harness. It's just that I additionally belong to the people who don't trust AI agents to always adhere to harnesses either.
simon_void··on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
true, but you'd be wrong to assume that Germans only compound words if both parts are nouns, e.g. "Gehweg" (walk way) and "Springseil" (jump rope) use the base of a verb. We do actually have "Kochwasser" ("kochen" means "to cook", "kochend" means "boiling") but that's not boiling water ("kochendes Wasser") but for water used for cooking.
simon_void··on Half million 'Words with Spaces' missing from dictionaries
not anything. As a German I see no way to compound "boiling water". It remains two words: "kochendes Wasser".
simon_void··on Kotlin's rich errors: Native, typed errors without exceptions
thank you for the link to the talk! I actually witnessed the talk live, but must have completely missed this or simply forgot that this was answered :D
simon_void··on Kotlin's rich errors: Native, typed errors without exceptions
Rich Errors look promising to me, but what about interop with Java? What will the return-type of a function be on the Java side be, if the return type on Kotlin side is: Int | ParseError | SomeOtherError?

Background: unions aren't restricted to one normal type and one error type, but to one normal type and any number of error types, so this can't be modelled as syntactic sugar on top of an implicit Either/Result type, can it??

simon_void··on C Is Best (2025)
technically, Kotlin can use VirtualThreads like it can use any other Java Api (when being compiled to JVM bytecode).[1] If I remember correctly the Kotlin team was e.g. thinking about implementing a Coroutine Dispatcher with VirtualThreads. So building a Kotlin service that uses Virtual Threads instead of coroutines is -in principle- possible. But if you've got a Java project using Virtual Threads you could rewrite it slowly -class for class- to Kotlin (and later probably refactor the VirtualThreads to coroutines). What you have to keep in mind though: if you're creating a Kotlin lib that is meant to be used by Java then the public Api of this lib should include suspend functions! My company made that mistake at some point, they ordered a lib from an external supplier and since Java and Kotlin are both first class languages and "Kotlin is compatible with Java", they ordered this lib in Kotlin. They learned the hard way that Kotlin suspend methods translate to Java methods returning a Continuation class (!? If I remember correctly. I wasn't part of that project, but heard their story) which is very unergonomic to use manually. The fix was to write a small Kotlin shim lib that wrapped the other lib and replaced every suspend function with a normal function invoking their suspend counterpart in a runBlocking-block (I think). Hardly ideal, but workable. So yes, writing a Kotlin lib that's (also) meant to be consumed from Java requires more thought than one that is only meant to be used by Kotlin. (There is functionality in Kotlin to help with this though, e.g. look up the annotations @JvmStatic, @JvmName, @JvmRecord.)

[1] https://void2unit.onrender.com/post/virtualthreads-in-kotlin...

simon_void··on Was it a billion dollar mistake?
I really like languages with non-/nullable types like Kotlin and Rust! I used to work with Java for over a decade and therefore used to code very defensively against NullPointerException and now (with Kotlin) I just don't have to do this anymore. That being said there are two possible sources of nullpointers: from inside your program or from outside (e.g. the json your server got send wasn't fully initialized). The majority of NullPointers come from outside in my experience. Nullpointers from within you have to fix mostly once. but there's no end to what data send to you from outside your control can be missing. Of course you still have to validate/parse outside data when using Kotlin but since the type system then carries on which data has been validated, you can drop the defensive mindset that was appropriate in Java.

So if you have a self-contained, non-safety critical project and want to use/try out an arena-allocated memory approach using Odin seems fine (e.g. looking at you: "raytracing in a weekend").

So yeah, I think there's a niche of projects where the possibility of null pointers isn't a huge deal.

None of my work-related projects fall in that category though :D

simon_void··on Rust's Block Pattern
I agree, i started with (scope) blocks in Rust, but keep the habit in Kotlin win the run - scope-function. Since run takes no arguments, it feels like the closest equivalent to Rust scopes (compared to other Korlin scope functions, which also keep their local variables from polluting the rest of the function body).
simon_void··on Computer animator and Amiga fanatic Dick van Dyke turns 100
a Corridor Crew YouTube video describing/recreating that sodium vapour process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQuIVsNzqDk
simon_void··on What if I don't want videos of my hobby time available to the world?
this is exactly about what is legal or not. If I remember correctly in Germany there's a distinction about people being the focus of a photograph or people in the background. You can e.g. publish a picture of a public place without asking everybody on that place for their consent. Another corner case would be filming police brutality. What if the police officers in question wouldn't like to be photographed being brutal!? Local laws do apply.
simon_void··on WASM 3.0 Completed
I works very well, thank you for asking: https://rustwasm.github.io/book/
simon_void··on Go is still not good
Kotlin! personal disclosure: I'm a Kotlin fan boy. (If performance is important then Rust, but Kotlin is more ergonomic.)
simon_void··on Go is still not good
In a worlde where kotlin exists, I still have not seen any reason to consider java XD
simon_void··on Go is still not good
there are two ways to achieve native binaries with Kotlin: 1) Kotlin native https://kotlinlang.org/docs/native-overview.html 2) Kotlin JVM but use GraalVM https://www.graalvm.org/ (which creates a binary of your program combined with GraalVM)
simon_void··on Byte Buddy is a code generation and manipulation library for Java
I like Rust as much as the next guy, but Kotlin is the most ergonomic programming language I know. So my approach is to use Kotlin by default and should it some day become clear that the service is a bottleneck (or if the cloud cost can be lowered substancially), to only then rewrite it in Rust. At that point the service has probably already gained most of the functionality it'll ever have, which should make the Rust conversion as straight-forward as it can be.
simon_void··on Byte Buddy is a code generation and manipulation library for Java
I wonder if that confusion is due to the fact that you haven't yet wrapped your head around the fact that extension functions are "just" syntactic sugar for static functions. The implicit "this" becomes the the first parameter of the static function and function parameters can be null. Now you might ask "why not use static (/first class) functions then? Because those "feel" like less ideomatic to use then extension functions or methods that are defined on the object (hirachy) itself. But understanding why the extension type can be nullable is not the same is using it on nullable types. I restrict my extension functions to non-nullable types most of the time as well. The best exception to this preference -just to see where it makes sense- is the build-in function [toString](https://kotlinlang.org/api/core/kotlin-stdlib/kotlin/to-stri...), since you want it to return "null" if you invoke it on null.
simon_void··on Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin
Jetbrains is working on an LSP: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp It was announced at KotlinConf 2025.
simon_void··on Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin
I know one of these developers as well! It's me :D
simon_void··on Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin
this will change, Jetbrains is working on a Kotlin-LSP, just don't expect it to be done anytime soon: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp
simon_void··on Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin
i've used ktor for 2 small-ish microservices. It's fine. I was curious about corouitnes. I know SpringBoot has support for corouitnes as well, but in ktor it's front and center. (Disclaimer: I never used Scala)
simon_void··on Detekt – A static code analyzer for Kotlin
at the (semi-state owned) company (in Germany) I work at, Kotlin is a first-class language also for backend. It depends on the teams wheather they prefer Java or Kotlin. I'm firmly in the team-Kotlin camp and Java code that becomes my responsibility has the strong tendency to suddenly become Kotlin code. By the way, I never worked on Android, so all my Kotlin work (since 2019) was server-side Kotlin.

Java is getting better, so maybe in 10 years it'll be a less ergonomic Kotlin variant.

PS: Jetbrains - the company behind Kotlin - started a strategic partnership with the Spring team, to make the combo Kotlin-Spring even better: https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2025/05/strategic-partners...

PSS: Jetbrains is actually working on an official Kotlin-lsp server: https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlin-lsp So devs in the near future won't be locked into the IntelliJ ecosystem, if that is a concern of yours.

simon_void··on Koto Programming Language
check out Borgo https://github.com/borgo-lang/borgo It is Go with algebraic datatypes!
simon_void··on WASM GC isn't ready for realtime graphics
true, it's just that the topic of this post seemed strange to me, since you wouldn't use a programming language with GC for high intensity graphics app in native either, hmmm.
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