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b3morales commented on Nim 2.2.6   nim-lang.org//blog/2025/1... · Posted by u/xz18r
banashark · 4 months ago
The main release note here is more stable async. I’m curious how folks using nim feel about the async situation.

One of the most recent opinions from the discord is:

“ we have async and asyncdispatch but its leaky and bug prone esp when used with threads and causes deep ownership issues, i prefer using taskman when possible but it leaves the IO problem yet unsolved ”

I’ve also been told to just use regular threads whenever possible.

Do others have more info or sentiments to share?

b3morales · 4 months ago
As one who was interested by Nim and tried it out for some personal projects, I found that this was the biggest problem with the project. There's several options for any given need (including internal tools like LSP or installing the compiler) with very little clear way to choose between them. Each will have different (dis)advantages that you must discover primarily by digging through forum posts or GitHub issues.

In some ways it's the sign of a very strong language, like the curse of Lisp: someone can easily just write their own version of whatever they need. But as a user trying to navigate the ecosystem it is frustrating. I do keep meaning to try it out again though; the language itself is very pleasant to use.

b3morales commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts   fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
antifa · 9 months ago
> You could say the same thing about tulip bulbs or any other famous bubble. Lots of smart people with no stake get sucked in.

While I agree with the skepticism, what specifically is the stake here? Most code assists have usable plans in the $10-$20 range. The investors are apparently taking a much bigger risk than the consumer would be in a case like this.

Aside from the horror stories about people spending $100 in one day of API tokens for at best meh results, of course.

b3morales · 9 months ago
The stakes of changing the way so many people work can't be seen in a short term. Could be good or bad. Probably it will be both, in different ways. Margarine instead of butter seemed like a good idea until we noticed that hydrogenation was worse (in some ways) than the cholesterol problem we were trying to fight.

AI company execs also pretty clearly have a politico-economic idea that they are advancing. The tools may stand on their own but what is the broader effect of supporting them?

b3morales commented on My AI skeptic friends are all nuts   fly.io/blog/youre-all-nut... · Posted by u/tabletcorry
rfrey · 9 months ago
That's exactly the point, it's hard to see how someone could hold that view and pillory AI companies for slurping up proprietary code.

You probably don't have those views. But I think Thomas' point is that the profession as a whole has been crying "information wants to be free" for so many years, when what they meant was "information I don't want to pay for wants to be free" - and the hostile response to AI training on private data underlines that.

b3morales · 9 months ago
Because it's rules for us and not for them. If I take Microsoft's code and "transform" it I get sued. If Microsoft takes everyone else's code and "transforms" it (and sells it back to us) well, that's just business, pal. Thomas's argument is completely missing this point.

EDIT to add, I said this more completely a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34381996

b3morales commented on An aborted experiment with server Swift   flak.tedunangst.com/post/... · Posted by u/ibotty
nickpeterson · 2 years ago
I seem to remember something about the original designer leaving Apple and a bit of bad blood but I might be misremembering.
b3morales · 2 years ago
You are probably thinking of this by Chris Lattner: https://forums.swift.org/t/core-team-to-form-language-workgr... (on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30416070) Swift has always been developed by a team of course, but he was the lead and probably the most public face.
b3morales commented on Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17   blog.timac.org/2023/1019-... · Posted by u/ingve
aalimov_ · 2 years ago
Genuinely curious to know which apps you are referring to.
b3morales · 2 years ago
There can be no clearer example than iTunes's downgrade into the awful Music and somehow even worse Podcasts. On the plus it has invogorated the 3rd party space.
b3morales commented on Apple's use of Swift and SwiftUI in iOS 17   blog.timac.org/2023/1019-... · Posted by u/ingve
MBCook · 2 years ago
It’s not nebulous.

There are kinds of bugs that Swift can provably catch that Objective-C can’t.

There are bits of safety that Swift can ensure without needing to do additional boundary checks or something else, leading to faster/smaller code.

Perhaps biggest of all Swift doesn’t need a runtime like Obj-C. Apple has done an amazing job tuning it, but a direct function call is always going to be faster than message passing.

b3morales · 2 years ago
> Perhaps biggest of all Swift doesn’t need a runtime like Obj-C

Swift most certainly has a runtime: https://github.com/apple/swift/tree/main/stdlib/public/runti... And most or all of it is written in C++, not Swift last I checked. Whenever you see a `_swift_fooBarBaz` symbol in a stack trace, that's the runtime.

b3morales commented on What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023   tonsky.me/blog/unicode/... · Posted by u/mrzool
astrange · 2 years ago
The length/count property was added after people asked for it, but it wasn't originally in the String revamp, and it provides iterators for all of the above. .count also only claims to be O(n) to discourage using it.
b3morales · 2 years ago
That was almost seven years ago now. It has been the String API twice as long as it has not been the API.
b3morales commented on What every software developer must know about Unicode in 2023   tonsky.me/blog/unicode/... · Posted by u/mrzool
astrange · 2 years ago
String iteration should be based on whatever you want to iterate on - bytes, codepoints, grapheme clusters, words or paragraphs. There's no reason to privilege any one of these, and Swift doesn't do this.

"Length" is a meaningless query because of this, but you might want to default to whatever approximates width in a UI label, so that's grapheme clusters. Using codepoints mostly means you wish you were doing bytes.

b3morales · 2 years ago
> There's no reason to privilege any one of these, and Swift doesn't do this.

Strange thing to say: Swift String count property is the count of extended grapheme clusters. The documentation is explicit:

> A string is a collection of extended grapheme clusters, which approximate human-readable characters. [emphasis in original]

b3morales commented on 50+ SwiftUI Components that you can copy paste in your next iOS project   trace.zip... · Posted by u/vdthatte
b3morales · 3 years ago
Without a source code license somewhere on site (I don't see any after looking around) you had better not copy-paste these into a next project. The default state if there's no explicit permission granted is that it's not usable: https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/

u/b3morales

KarmaCake day2085April 18, 2021View Original