smallstepforman

Ref counting is for ownership, it doesnt convey intent. It kind of accidently works but is the wrong abstraction, especially in code bases where ownership is known.

This is all well and dandy for some usage scenarios but breaks in others, eg. scene graphs and GUI's.

A scene graph needs 2 mutable references, and has nothing to do with ownership. Same issue exists with GUI's. The pattern that Rust forces is to always request a reference, which incurs a performance penalty while retrieving the same reference again and again and again.

We humans cannot scan 100’000 articles looking for the golden nugget, the AI data mining can do it and present it in seconds. Obviously we need to verify the data.

A couple of decades ago, we didnt trust compilers, we did assembly manually. Today is same barrier, some developers will explode with productivity while others will be left behind.

Every year they grant prizes. If hardly anyone is doing core R&D because of cost cutting, there is a higher chance those doing the smallest amount of R&D get the prizes.

A Nobel in 2026 doesnt carry the same weight as a Nobel in 1955.

Its the stack space allocated to each thread that prevents you from spawning more than a thousand threads. Strategies like a thread per network connection do not scale.

Who watches Netflix at 30% brightness? Another useless marketing blurb, really puts me off from reading the rest.

5 sins in 1992: - 8 bit planar instead of chunky - progressive display (vs interlaced) - sound was not 16-bit - should have been 68030 with mmu support (vs 68020ec) - HD mandatory.

If they addressed this, the Doom experience would have run better on Amiga.

At 27”, 2560x1440 withouth scaling is your better option vs UHD and x2 scaling. You need a pair of screens for true bliss.

Haiku package system has an unparalleled installstion, deletion, boot into previous states, data integrity (read only packages) and dealing with conflicting library policy. Its a technical crime that other systems are not copying Haiku packages … they’re several decades behind. IOS is half way there …

In the Linux world and even Haiku, there is a standard package dependacy format, so dependencies aren’t really a problem. Even OSX has Homebrew. Windows is the odd man out.

As with all things commercial, my neighbour keeps 40 hives and extracts too much honey in the autumn, resulting in desperate hungry bees in the spring that get very aggressive. If he left them more honey (less profits), they wouldnt be as hungry or aggressive. The entire neighbourhood suffers due to the antics of a single owner. Legally, he’s within the council regulations so there is nothing we can do … Its impossible to sit outside from 9am-6pm in April and May. Once there is enough food, they calm down.

In Haiku windowing system, each app window gets its own thread so dialog boxes run in a different thread to the main window and a different thread to the core app. In Linux, all windows share the same message loop thread. A simple port reveals threading issues in Haiku which dont exist on Linux.

To work around this, all window messages in ported apps are marshalled to execute sequentially. Small additional overhead, and the system doesnt spread available threads, so noticably slower.

Compare a native Haiku app with a ported app, one is smooth as ice while the other isnt. Users notice it. This is on many core systems.

There is always the one App which isnt available elsewhere that prevents migration. I’ve been a full time Amiga user, BeOS user, OSX, user, currently I multiboot with Win11, Linux Mint and Haiku nightly, and Windows 11 still gets 99% screen time due to the one App. All other apps I use daily are cross platform.

For everyone its a different App. For me, Visual Studio 2022 and its world class visual debugger that inspects my complex vectors. Sadly, nothing similar (Xcode slow, QtCreator slow, etc).

I do enjoy Haiku the most, but cannot be as effecient when developing embedded libraries. I professionally develop cross platform libs, developed on Win11 but deployed on Linux embedded. Irony.

I’m so frustrated that the default for password fields is “hidden”. The number of times I had someone observing me type a password is < 0.001% of password entries. There is a post it note on most peoples monitors with visible passwords anyway.

Reverse the logic and make a “sudo_h” script which hides the password entry for those rare times you need it.

256Kb stack per Fiber is still insane overhead compared to Actors. I guess if we survey programming community, I’d guesstimate that less than 2% of devs even know what the Actor model is, and an even smaller percentage have actually used it in production.

Any program that has at least one concurrent task that runs on a thread (naturally they’ll be more than one) is a perfect reason to switch to Actor programming model.

Even a simple print() function can see performance boost from running on a 2nd core. There is a lot of backround work to print text (parsing font metrics, indexing screen buffers, preparing scene graphs etc) and its really inefficient to block your main application while doing all this work while background cores sit idle. Yet most programmers dont know about this performance boost. Sad state of our education and the industry.

Read the article. Satya brought the share price from $35 to $400, that wont kill Microsoft.

I guess what you’re trying to say is that it will kill Windows. But that wont happen since enormous percentage of businesses run Windows ecosystem.

Lets face it, Windows is in maintenance mode, pointless for MS to invest heavily in it since there is no threat for businesses switching to Linux or something else. MS devs primary maintenance job these days should just be scrabling MS Office API every 6 months or so to break Wine and other Linux non-emulators. Wine devs in constand rearrange deck chairs mode, while Win32+Office devs just add a new parameter to an API interface in their 6 month cyclic undocumented API breaking scheme.

You need a better Office than MS Office to break the cycle, and this will be a Web based office / collaboration tool. And guess where MS Azure and Web services fit in this brand new world.

Microsoft dominance aint going away in our lifetimes. Only non US government pressure may force other countries to switch to a flavour of Linux due to US sanctions. Only then can you see a visible migration from Windows. This is a decades long process.

Can Apple marketing please reduce the insane quantity of adjectives in its releases, it has been nauseating to read for decades and sickens me when visiting their sites. Early exit from me and ex-OSX dev for over a decade, wont be back until their core culture changes.

No Such Agency is the biggest government data collection agency, why not name the hosting country?

I must be the only GIMP user that has never complained about the UX. But I have never used Photoshop so I’m not fighting muscle memory.

The challenge is to get cost sensitive businesses to support this. Juniors are a cost and when trained move on, thats the fundamental problem. Retention only works with smart companues, for most other companies its a revolving door.

On the plus side, as a dev with 30+ years of experience, I am commanding a very good contract salary these days. Revolving door companies stuck in process hell and product rot, and cannot deliver new value, so they’re scrambling to find experienced devs that cost a premium. My salary today makes up for peanuts at the start of my career.

OS’s which dont have user accounts (eg always root) like Haiku and Amiga are going to thrive soon …

Well, in the real world we need at least polymorphism and operator overloading, but that is against the core Zig philosophy, so serious GameDev ignores it (which ironically one would think is the biggest core market for low level systems programming). Hence why new GameDev development still chooses C++, and Andrew’s project fails to gain a significant boost in users.

As people pointed out, change the distance to 43 meters and you’ll get the walk answer.

You’ve never tried Haiku, you’re missing out on a remarkable desktop experience.

Thank you for creating Homeworld, it truely was a memorable experience.

I’m 5 years older than James and had a similar discovery and enthusiasm path which got lost in the era commercial big modern systems. The soul of the machine has long since disappeared.

There was a brief period when I discovered BeOS 4.5 which brought the wonder back in September 1999. That was short lived. I occassionally get the bug with Haiku but sadly dont have the spare time during this last decade.

Enthusiast on small platforms still chase the bug, in these smaller communities you can actually make a difference, and there is still passion to be found there. There is also some innovation since experimental concepts can be tried out.

If Linus started his OS project in 2026, he might have chosen Zig instead of C.

Ever use a leak detector? Even my graphics engines (with shared resources) uses a leak detector in debug mode. The monent you forget to release a resource, assertion at program termination.

Leaks are trapped with tooling, and all you need is one dev in the team to be diligant to run valgrind or visual leak detector or similar.

Noble quest, but without operator overloading when dealing with Matrix*Vector you end up with an unreadable mess for physics, skeletal animation etc. There is a reason professional game dev is still 90% C++. (Funny enough, amateur gamedev is C# these days, students use what they learn at uni).

C’s biggest sins (also inherited by C++):

- unspecified default type sizes. Should have had i8, u16, i32, u64, f32, f64 from the beginning.

- aliasing pointers being restricted by default (ie an alias keyword should have been added). Performance matters. All these benchmarks which show something beating C or C++ are mostly due to dealing with aliasing pointers. C++26 still doesnt have standardised restrict keyword.

There are more but I understand the logic/usability/history behind them. The above points should have been addressed in the 80’s.