Going from something like "Go lacks a builtin arena allocation" to "Go risks becoming the COBOL" is a long stretch. First, Go is slower than C/C++/rust without complex memory allocation. Introducing an arena allocator won't fix that. Second, arena allocation often doesn't work for a lot of allocation patterns. Third, plain arena allocator is easy to implement when needed. Surely a builtin one would be better but Go won't fall without it.
Readit Newsacmj commented on Golang's big miss on memory arenas avittig.medium.com/golang... · Posted by u/andr3wV
acmj commented on Amtrak NextGen Acela Debuts on August 28 media.amtrak.com/2025/08/... · Posted by u/reimbar
Great news! I hope prices go back down a bit thanks to the extra capacity. I used to take Acela 3 times a week about a decade ago and they were rarely completely full. Now they're more expensive and fully booked much of the time, which is a real shame.
How is "full booked" a real shame?
acmj commented on Python performance myths and fairy tales lwn.net/SubscriberLink/10... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
Python as a language will likely never have a "fast" implementation and still be Python. It is way too dynamic to be predictable from the code alone or even an execution stream in a way that allows you to simplify the actual code that will be executed at runtime either through AOC or JIT. The language is itself is also quite large in terms of syntax and built-in capability at this point which makes new feature-conplete implementations that don't make major trade offs quite challenging. Given how capable LLMs are at translating code, it seems like the perfect time to build a language with similar syntax, but better scoped behavior, stricter rules around typing, and tooling to make porting code and libraries automated and relatively painless. What would existing candidates be and why won't they work as a replacement?
Pypy is 10x faster and is compatible with most cpython code. IMHO it was a big mistake not to adopt JIT during the 2-to-3 transition.
acmj commented on Cognition (Devin AI) to Acquire Windsurf cognition.ai/blog/windsur... · Posted by u/alazsengul
A very productive minority.
Are there studies to show those paying $200/month to openai/claude are more productive?
acmj commented on Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes harvard.edu/president/new... · Posted by u/impish9208
acmj commented on Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes harvard.edu/president/new... · Posted by u/impish9208
I mean, we literally just saw what happened at JHU when their USAID funding vanished. Everybody on that soft money got laid off.
That’s what makes stands like this hard for admin: you’re risking massive layoffs in the programs that are often the least political to defend the academic freedom of the programs that are often the most political. Columbia made one decision. Harvard is making another. You could make Lord Farquaad jokes here, but if it alone loses its federal funding in these expensive research areas, it will lose its preeminence in those areas for a long time.
I guess Harvard saw the decision at Columbia made the situation worse [1], so they decided to make a different one.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-freezes-all-rese...
acmj commented on Harvard's response to federal government letter demanding changes harvard.edu/president/new... · Posted by u/impish9208
With their endowment above $50 billion, combined with Federal plus Non-Federal sponsored revenue at 16% of operating budget, it makes sense to me they just forgo Federal funds and operate independently.
If all 16% is canceled, then they'd need to draw an additional $1 billion per year from endowment at current budget levels.
That would put them above 7% draw so potentially unsustainable for perpetuity, historically they've averaged 11% returns though, so if past performance is a predictor of future, they can cover 100% of Federal gap and still grow the endowment annually with no new donations.
People here have little idea about how Harvard works. Harvard is financially vulnerable. It is currently running on a deficiency considering the endowment. And Harvard can't freely use most endowment for personnels anyway. If the government takes away funding, Harvard will have a financial crisis. I guess the leadership made the decision in hope someone could stop the government before bad things happen but when bad things do happen, you will probably see mass layoffs of researchers in particular in life sciences and biomedical research.
Some part of this article is opinionated. Curl may be well written but this is more likely to be the result of the overall structure than the number of characters per line. Actually I don't know whether curl is well written. Popularity doesn't always equate to code quality. I have used curl APIs before. I don't like them.
acmj commented on Shift-to-Middle Array: A Faster Alternative to Std:Deque? github.com/attilatorda/Sh... · Posted by u/AttilaT
> Unlike std::deque, which uses a fragmented block-based structure
I always assumed deque implementations were ring buffers that double in size once full so that prepend/append operations are amortized O(1).
std::deque typically uses chunked arrays. It is more complex but tends to be faster than a ring buffer based implementation.
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