pcwalton

6 ms·

1.
by pcwalton 4mo ago
> From all state actions I’ve seen for a decade straight in the crypto space, this largely seems to be an education issue that makes the state’s ability to prosecute a brief privilege Or, you know, they could come up to you in a San Fran
2.
by pcwalton 5mo ago
> Apple seems to have lost its academic roots, and suffers for it now. Or I should say, its customers suffer while it grosses almost half a trillion dollars per year. At least with vibe coding we can just whip up a Preview app in an afte
3.
by pcwalton 5mo ago
You can run arbitrary computations on iOS devices if they're written in JavaScript, WebAssembly, or Swift (via Playgrounds). All of these are Turing complete, and all three compile into machine code. What you don't have without an
4.
by pcwalton 11mo ago
Sure, but the relevant comparison isn't between languages: it's between a state-of-the-art JIT implementation of one language and a likewise-state-of-the-art AOT implementation of the same language. Unfortunately there aren't
5.
by pcwalton 11mo ago
I believe HotSpot is usually faster than GCJ.
6.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Mathematically, what you want to do here is to calculate the area of the pixel square (or circle; however you want to approximate it) that the shape covers. In this case a linear ramp actually approximates the true value better than smooths
7.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Your note taking app doesn't need AI, but it also doesn't need OLE, which represented an equally hot buzzword ("software componentry") of the 90s that Microsoft was trying to shoehorn into everything. Every generation ha
8.
by pcwalton 1y ago
jcranmer is correct and pointer provenance-related issues are not "boxed and contained". Start here: https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2020/12/14/provenance.html
9.
by pcwalton 1y ago
My recollection is that Brian Anderson, who came from the C# world, was an early advocate of the easily-googlable error codes that Microsoft compilers use a lot, and pushed to get them in. That was a good call. (In general Brian had a lot o
10.
by pcwalton 1y ago
When I was first developing early versions of rustc I was really fascinated with Clang's effort at good error messages, which was helping it gain traction vs. GCC at the time, and I tried to start the Rust compiler project off on the r
11.
by pcwalton 1y ago
The modal urbanist who lives in the suburbs is usually just someone who wants to be able to have the lifestyle they want without a commute to work. Someone who works at Google in Mountain View but would prefer not to have to drive everywher
12.
by pcwalton 1y ago
But urbanists do live in cities? San Francisco proper is, like, the origin of the YIMBY movement. Searching for "baltimore yimby" on Google brings up a lot of advocacy, like this: https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com&#x2F
13.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Yes, all Rust papers anyone tried to submit were consistently rejected up until Rust became popular, at which point Rust became the hot new thing in applied programming language research. Academic PL is very insular (to its detriment, I&#x2
14.
by pcwalton 1y ago
You can raise the cost of cheating so that cheating kids will get annoyed and go cheat in some other game or scroll TikTok or whatever. We're not exactly dealing with nation-states here.
15.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Yeah, sorry, my mistake. GitHub did report on the SO survey [1], which probably led to my mixup. Anyway, Rust was still the "most admired" language in 2024 [2]. [1]: https://github.blog/developer-skills/progra
16.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Yes, you have correctly pointed out that there are some developers who are unhappy with Rust. I don't really care to have an argument as to whether "Rust has peaked" or not. Rust is the same language now as it was in 2023, an
17.
by pcwalton 1y ago
I'm happy to revise what I said from "Rust keeps winning" to "Rust continually won" if you want to nitpick my choice of verb tenses. It refutes the idea that the "developer joy is pretty low" either way.
18.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Because "else" technically includes "comptime_float", so that case is handled, just not in the way that's expected. One of the downsides of comptime over generics is that, because it's low-level and procedura
19.
by pcwalton 1y ago
https://github.blog/developer-skills/programming-languages-a...
20.
by pcwalton 1y ago
> Rust is still popular but it turns out the developer joy is pretty low. I mean, Rust keeps winning the "most loved" language contest on GitHub, so it seems someone likes it.
21.
by pcwalton 1y ago
This is a good point. Zig is practically optimized for this: comptime is extremely dynamically typed compared to actual generics, and the lack of memory safety is often "a breath of fresh air"--until you have to actually fix bugs
22.
by pcwalton 1y ago
> It's not a great hobby language but it is a fantastic professional language, I never thought I'd live to see the day when someone would say this. The first 5 years of Rust were all "this is interesting for hobby projects
23.
by pcwalton 1y ago
If Microsoft had adopted this attitude, then by now Excel's market share would probably be 0% and Google Sheets' would be 100%. Microsoft doesn't add features because they like bloated software; they add features because the
24.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Over the past year I've been working at my studio to add enough features to Bevy to ship real apps, and Bevy is at the point where one can reasonably do that, depending on your needs.
25.
by pcwalton 1y ago
> You can't do possibly-erroneous pointer math on a C# object reference. Bevy entity IDs are opaque and you have to try really hard to do arithmetic on them. You can technically do math on instance IDs in Unity too; you might say &q
26.
by pcwalton 1y ago
Thankfully my studio has given me time to be able to submit a lot of upstream code to Bevy. I do agree that there's a bootstrapping problem here and I'm glad that I'm in a situation where I can help out. I'm not the only
27.
by pcwalton 1y ago
I just don't, and even less often with game logic which tends to be rather simple in terms of the data structures needed. In my experience, the ownership and borrowing rules are in no way an impediment to game development. That doesn&#
28.
by pcwalton 1y ago
> No Tiny Glade doesn’t count. > And if you look at Steam there are simply zero Rust made games in the top 2000. Zero. None nada zilch. Well, sure, if you arbitrarily exclude the popular game written in Rust, then of course there are
29.
by pcwalton 1y ago
> I really don’t think Rust is a good match for game dev. Both because of the borrow checker which requires a lot of handles instead of pointers and because compile times are just not great. I completely disagree, having been doing game
30.
by pcwalton 1y ago
> More than anything else, this sounds like a good lesson in why commercial game engines have taken over most of game dev. There are so many things you have to do to make a game, but they're mostly quite common and have lots of off-

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