I'll admit I've never written more than small programs in C, but the criticism that this "isn't C" isn't a fair criticism to me. He's not doing anything more than any other library can do, were he to write a compiler that mapped directly to really boring C, would it be more or less C than this? I don't feel like those questions are useful. We need experiments like this, and for me personally, cello was a revelation when it was posted here years ago. There are no rules that say you can't do it.
I know he's doing a little hackiness by placing the size before the start of the object, but they also take that approach here (https://www.piumarta.com/software/cola/objmodel2.pdf) so maybe it's not that uncommon. How would you do the dual pointer setup? Is there any overhead from that, or is it small enough to not worry about?
The "isn't C" argument is more about the library as a whole, not specifically about the fat pointer suggestions. (Please look at the github repo, IMHO it's obvious.)
Placing a length "before" a pointer is perfectly fine on a _technical_ level. It's also how glibc's malloc works, it has its own data before any allocation it returns. However, hackiness is not the question here - it's whether it's the "best" approach. I simply believe, based on my own experiences, that twin pointers cover/win out in a much larger subset of applicable scenarios.
As for how to implement it - declare a struct with 2 pointers in it. Or just pass 2 pointers around.
Unfortunately, no, your info about Perl 6 is news to me. Only ran into it a few months ago, tried it in Python and Nim, but haven't seen it in the wild. It's very cool though.
Goes without saying, but it is shocking how quickly the world has changed. The easy take would be that a lot of people are finding out how the other half lives, without easy access to healthcare or using credit cards to pay bills, but the poorer are disproportionately affected.
The only positive, if there is one, is the ability to really consider how our societies operate, how dangerous apathy and incompetence are and for tech workers more specifically, to realize how much of an impact our work has.
The next time someone wants to act like they know what the future looks like, remind them to have some humility. Be safe yall. This too shall pass.
> The easy take would be that a lot of people are finding out how the other half lives...
...and that the market has already priced in the uncertainty. So long as the expected value improves, the markets can weather a long tail of suffering absent political upheaval that might change the game.
The media has spent years trumpeting that things are broken and precarious. That many folks cannot pay their mobile phone bills or cable bills or credit card bills at the first hint of a downturn is not news.
Sorry but I can't help but remark on the contradiction in your last paragraph... Nobody knows for sure what the future will look like, but don't worry, you know that this too shall pass and things will go back to normal.
> you know that this too shall pass and things will go back to normal.
No, we don't. Who knows if this coronavirus will ever truly go away? What will the new "normal" be like when—if—things truly settle down. Surely our world will be forever marked by this event.
> Who knows if this coronavirus will ever truly go away?
Wait, what?
I keep hearing this notion floated around and I'm honestly very confused.
Are people under the impression that our lockdowns are going to eradicate this? Or are you using "going away" as a metaphor for "will recede to the background level of death from flu/etc that we have learned to tune out?"
It should be stunningly obvious that a highly infectious respiratory disease that is present in every country, originally came from animals and has shown the ability to infect other animals will never be eradicated. There's too many reservoirs, even if the totalitarian dream that everyone seems to want were a full reality.
If you meant the other sense, then it should be equally obvious that this will eventually pass through the population and we will build immunity to it, at which point Covid-19 joins the friendly cast of characters such as the common cold coronaviruses, common cold rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, influenza, etc. In short, a disease that kills people but not in numbers that we freak out about. (And incidentally once the globe has been exposed to it it should be much less deadly than Influenza since new humans will be exposed to it as babies/young children and not as 80+ year old nursing home patients, and Covid simply does not kill young children in significant numbers)
What's that? Do I hear the "There's no evidence for immunity to covid-19" crowd in the distance? I'm getting a bit tired of that line, but if someone wants me to dismantle that argument (again) I am happy to.
Clearly it is not obvious, considering most people have never spent a significant amount of time thinking about how infectious diseases work.
> What's that? Do I hear the "There's no evidence for immunity to covid-19" crowd in the distance? I'm getting a bit tired of that line, but if someone wants me to dismantle that argument (again) I am happy to.
Why make a snarky, coy comment like this? If you have something to say about immunity then just say it. In fact the WHO are among those who make this claim[0], so "dismantle" away.
"immunity" is a bit of an imprecise term. There's two major components:
(1) The presence of active circulating antibodies, which in sufficient concentrations should result in literal immunity in the sense of inability to catch the virus
Eventually those circulating antibodies will no longer be actively present, but you'll still have
(2) Memory B Cells which lie dormant, waiting for exposure to viral antigens at which point they ramp up antibody production like crazy.
So in the worst case scenario, immunity in the sense of inability to be infected disappears after X months, but any infection would be much milder and would clear much more quickly than normal with lower peak viral load.
Let's talk about "herd immunity" while we're at it since that's been branded as a "dirty word (phrase)". Herd immunity is just the logical consequence of individual immunity as applied to population-level dynamics. So people that don't "believe" in herd immunity are like people that don't believe in evolution, in that both logically follow from the ground truths.
--
Nothing I've said there contradicts the WHO, but it's worth mentioning that at this point it seems inaccurate to say "there is no evidence" rather than to say "there is not overwhelming evidence", and they've sort of given themselves away with this line:
> People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice
So, as always, they carefully shape statements to try to control behavior.
--
Anyway, I'm actually not trying to argue against the WHO here, but rather the hordes of people who trot out the "we don't know if there even is immunity" to try to argue that "herd immunity" is a foolish/dangerous proposition when the truth is that it's how we deal with every non-containable pandemic. That is what I was getting at with my needlessly snarky and coy comment.
BTW, just to be clear, vaccines rely on the same principle. So those who point to the uncertainty as an argument "against" herd immunity (which again to me is like arguing "against evolution" since both herd immunity and evolution are logical consequences of some simple ground truths taken to their logical conclusions), are also arguing against hunkering down for 2.5 years while we develop a vaccine.
Just to support your argument, according to Wikipedia only one human disease has ever been eradicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eradication_of_infectious_dise...
It is thus unlikely that Covid will be eradicated, and much more likely that it will be endemic. My best guess is that when people talk about Covid being "eradicated" they are making a mistake and really mean something like "there is a vaccine"...
Yeah, I think that's what many people mean. Although I have actually talked to a terrifyingly high number of people in real life who really do think that the goal of the lockdowns is to eradicate the disease. And it's not surprising given the absolutely unclear and misleading messaging from our public health officials who appear to be more concerned with mass social control than with actual evidence-based public health policy. But now I'm ranting again...
> Surely our world will be forever marked by this event.
Yes, it will leave a mark during our lifetime, but that doesn't mean forever.
People quickly forget about terrible events, which is a blessing and a curse. Nobody remembers that much about the Spanish flu, and yet it was one of the deadliest pandemics known to mankind. This pandemic is dramatic and unprecedented in our lifetime, yet nobody can tell how that will affect us in the long term.
There are vested interests to come back to normal as fast as possible. And there are also incentives to use this crisis to push all kinds of agendas. I'd be wary about predictions.
I wonder if people in 1918 thought the same thing. And then the only impact the Spanish flu had on me was it was mentioned in passing in outdated middle school "social studies" books.
That's not true at all. The Spanish flu outbreak had a ton of impact on the modern world. Health codes, science around vaccines, economic effects, etc. To act like the Spanish flu had no long lasting effects shows you didn't pay much attention in middle school social studies.
I didn't. But it doesn't mean the books did it justice either. Anyway, I was trying to illustrate GP's point of getting back to normalcy, albeit vaguely.
Rust absolutely does not have the ergonomics of any of those languages because it has lifetimes. They are things you don't worry about in those languages.
Have you done a lot of Rust? I spent considerable time in Rust, and at the end of the day, after stepping away from it, I've found multiple options with the kind of ergonomics that make development a lot more productive for me.
Rust is not going to eat everything. I'd bet money on it. Rust will likely un quietly behind the scenes powering lots of great projects, but its audience is limited. I think HN really has a weak spot for understanding how few people even know what it is. I was surprised to ask a CS grad student that's done lots of machine learning about Rust, and he simply didn't know it existed. I like Rust and all that it taught me, but we need to be realistic about its ceiling and what it is appropriate for.
> Rust absolutely does not have the ergonomics of any of those languages because it has lifetimes. They are things you don't worry about in those languages.
You have to worry about them in any non-garbage collected language. There's just no compiler that checks that you're doing it correctly and is the primary source of security bugs for most software.
Understood. To be specific, they said Rust has the ergonomics of Python, Go, and Java, which are garbage collected languages. It does not strike me as realistic.
Not to advocate for one language over another, but sergio, you're right, Nim is ridiculously underrated and a much easier to use than rust. There's just a lot less mental overhead in almost anything and iteration is going to be much faster because lifetimes do get in the way.
Unfortunately this is one of those things where hype has kind of won out and I think a lot of people are dismissing an option like Nim simply because we're not talking about it on places like HN. Though, to be fair to Rust, the community is doing a lot of bleeding edge stuff that Nim's community just isn't big enough to.
I think like so many things we tend to turn programming language discussions into something akin to discussing religion. I really like Rust but that doesn't have to take anything away from other languages. I'll have to take a look at Nim at some point, it sounds like it has a lot of nice qualities! I really love that we're in what feels like an explosion of new and exciting languages to work with. I don't think Rust is the pinnacle of language design, so having more languages explore the space of possibilities is great!
With all that being said, when it comes to choosing a language for use in a business context the popularity of the language absolutely does matter. It has an impact on your ability to hire programmers, find packages to solve the problems you have in the language ecosystem, and have tooling that meets your needs, just to name a few. Now there is definitely a chicken-and-egg problem here as someone mentioned in another comment, in that you need adoption to drive adoption.
I'd advise you to try not to take these things personally. If you love Nim focus on doing cool things with Nim and making the Nim community a great place to be.
It's been a decade, but a friend in a college town just north of Dallas had an off campus apt for $300 a month. I had an off campus apt much closer to everything for under $500, similarly a friend even closer had an apt for $500.
The prices are a lot cheaper in a lot of US metros than the tech centers.
Those that don't know what it is like to not be naturally happy in many cases may not understand how easy it is to get intoa bad headspace, and how vitally important it is to take the correct steps to prevent it. It is life-threatening stuff and even when it is not, it is disabling, hence the strategy.
There is a book by some political scientists have the opposite starting point: Why Nations Fail. For the record, they've also got other material which I think is some of the most brilliant research we've got on why politics/societies are the way they are. Very obvious but conceptually simple, with multiple case studies of countries like your post, but (no offense) with a lot more data backing up their claims. Check it out!
RE: depression. Being someone that's dealt with it, I'm sensitive to it being characterized as irrational - there is more than a little research that suggests that depression is perfectly rational, that it reflects reality. I know personally that what I find irrational is individuals/orgs/societies that are driven by the abuse of others, by obsession with material wealth and status by people that have done nothing other than be social climbers, to be part of a species that after thousands of years of history makes the same mistakes (see above discussion).
Just saying. Have a little understanding for where your friend is coming from. For you to call it irrational may only lead them further into it, were you to say as much.
This is actually the inspiration for my blog title. And I agree, it has a lot more data and is more thorough than what I've written so it's hard to be offended by pointing that out.
> I'm sensitive to it being characterized as irrational
My bad. This is the language that she came up with as a way of describing her behaviour to me (i'm probably a bit too far on the rational side and less on the empathy side). But we definitely agree with the causes you point out - her idea of a peaceful life is escaping society altogether
I know he's doing a little hackiness by placing the size before the start of the object, but they also take that approach here (https://www.piumarta.com/software/cola/objmodel2.pdf) so maybe it's not that uncommon. How would you do the dual pointer setup? Is there any overhead from that, or is it small enough to not worry about?