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mjevans commented on Golang's big miss on memory arenas   avittig.medium.com/golang... · Posted by u/andr3wV
rkerno · 4 days ago
I think the overall sentiment with this post is sound, but arenas aren't the answer to Go's performance challenges. From my perspective, possibly in an effort to keep the language simple, Go's designers didn't care about performance. 'let the GC handle it' was the philosophy and as a result you see poor design choices all the way through the standard library. And the abstracting everything through interfaces then compounds the issue because the escape compiler can't see through the interface. The standard library is just riddled with unnecessary allocations. Just look at the JSON parser for instance and the recent work to improve it.

There is some interesting proposals on short term allocations, being able to specify that a local allocation will not leak.

Most recently, I've been fighting with the ChaCha20-Poly1305 implementation because someone in their 'wisdom' added a requirement for contiguous memory for the implementation, including extra space for a tag. Both ChaCha20 and Poly1305 are streaming algorithms, but the go authors decide 'you cannot be trusted' - here's a safe one-shot interface for you to use.

Go really needs a complete overhaul of their Standard Library to fix this, but I can't see this ever getting traction due to the focus on not breaking anything.

Go really is a great language, but should include performance / minimise the GC burden as a key design consideration for it's APIs.

mjevans · 4 days ago
I agree about nearly all of this, but in my fantasy I think the 'unsafe' library should be how to break the abstraction layer and adjust things directly when a good language model isn't provided.

JSON's just a nightmare though. The inane legacy of UCS2 / UTF16 got baked into Unicode 8, and UTF16 escapes into JSON.

mjevans commented on Rust in the kernel is no longer experimental   lwn.net/Articles/1049831/... · Posted by u/rascul
raggi · 5 days ago
That first sentence though. Bitfields and ABI alongside each other.

Bitfield packing rules get pretty wild. Sure the user facing API in the language is convenient, but the ABI it produces is terrible (particularly in evolution).

mjevans · 5 days ago
I would like a revision to bitfields and structs to make them behave the way a programmer things, with the compiler free to suggest changes which optimize the layout. As well as some flag that indicates the compiler should not, it's a finalized structure.
mjevans commented on Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal   mooreslawisdead.com/post/... · Posted by u/pabs3
jgalt212 · 9 days ago
> for a short enough period of time

but it's not a short term deal. funny enough, there's a cohort of bonds that never even made one payment. They are called first payment default bonds. There is a cheekier nickname for them, but it escapes me at the moment.

mjevans · 9 days ago
Suckers Buckers seems safe enough for work to say on a text only Internet thread. Just don't read it aloud.
mjevans commented on Sam Altman’s DRAM Deal   mooreslawisdead.com/post/... · Posted by u/pabs3
christophilus · 9 days ago
RAM is a very cyclical market, historically. You can look at $MU historical charts and kind of see that it trades like a cyclical (compare it to $RIO, for example).

Cyclical companies are easily burned by investing in infrastructure right at the peak. It happens all the time with little mining companies, and I think DRAM manufacturers are sort of the mining companies of tech.

mjevans · 9 days ago
Cyclical markets are the sort of thing 'National Strategic Reserves' should address...

Am I crazy for wanting this to be in Full ECC RAM modules suitable for composition into many device factors with hope that we'll finally go to reliable memory for all markets as a result?

mjevans commented on US air travelers without REAL IDs will be charged a $45 fee   apnews.com/article/real-i... · Posted by u/geox
ocdtrekkie · 13 days ago
The funny thing is this "requirement" got pushed back nearly 20 years and still isn't actually required, but if they set this fee in 2008 it would've been done in 2008. In America you don't get it done by requiring it, you get it done by making it cost more if you don't do it.
mjevans · 13 days ago
ID should be something the government provides to everyone "for free" (for taxes already paid, by all taxpayers).

That way anyone and everyone should be expected to have an ID and depriving someone of that ID or their use of real ID could be made a crime similar to unlawful detainment.

mjevans commented on Datacenters in space aren't going to work   taranis.ie/datacenters-in... · Posted by u/mindracer
DennisP · 14 days ago
Possibly even better would be Zubrin's recent book The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet, which goes into quite a bit of detail on how we could build a self-sustaining settlement.
mjevans · 14 days ago
Though it lacks in the headlines, my preference is to send the robots first to bootstrap local production. Unless we really screw up the worst case would be some extra garbage to clean up for future missions, and the best case is any sort of increase in local production capacity.
mjevans commented on Datacenters in space aren't going to work   taranis.ie/datacenters-in... · Posted by u/mindracer
ACCount37 · 15 days ago
Starlink v2 Mini has about 35 kW of solar power at peak irradiance. 2 kW is quite far from the limit of how much juice we can pack into modern mass produced satellites.
mjevans · 14 days ago
Got any guesses about energy used for propulsion, cooling solutions (energy used for them as well as overall capacity), communications and how those might degrade over time in a real environment rather than just academic theory?

That's not even considering the increase in exposure to radiation outside of the Earth's atmosphere (absorbing materials) and weakened at distance protective EM field.

mjevans commented on Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy   howtogeek.com/turned-old-... · Posted by u/makerdiety
patja · 14 days ago
Yes it is a NAS and it is cheap and convenient to repurpose hardware.

But for anything where your data is important isn't ECC memory still critical for a NAS in this day and age?

mjevans · 14 days ago
Yes, and my desktops utilize ECC too for that reason. I only lack ECC in the places it's really difficult to avoid that tremendous drawback.

E.G. a Steamdeck is or smartphone are both relegated as toy devices that are not for serious computing.

mjevans commented on Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy   howtogeek.com/turned-old-... · Posted by u/makerdiety
rini17 · 14 days ago
After I had a reckoning with bitrot, would muchly recommend to use something with ECC memory for NAS. And a checksumming filesystem with periodic scrubing that won't get corrupt on you silently.
mjevans · 14 days ago
Same, but I also discovered a wonderful bonus in the difference between True ECC DDR5 and just the on chip BS stuff.

ECC DDR5 boots insanely fast since the BIOS can quickly verify the tune passes. This is even true when doing your initial adjustment / verification of manufacturer spec.

mjevans commented on Americans no longer see four-year college degrees as worth the cost   nbcnews.com/politics/poli... · Posted by u/jnord
nradov · 15 days ago
Right, the federal tax code is structured to give advantages to employer sponsored health plans. But it doesn't have to be that way. A better approach would be to eliminate those plans and force everyone to purchase individual or family plans through state ACA marketplaces using pre-tax dollars.
mjevans · 15 days ago
Or, just provide 'basic healthcare' as a human right (and service for being taxed) and make ALL plans on top of that luxury services.

Wouldn't you like to STOP the insanity of "picking" a plan every year (or more) and also end the billing nightmare by just making it all single payer (the government of the people, for the people)?

u/mjevans

KarmaCake day10701August 5, 2014View Original