muth02446 (u/muth02446)

muth02446 commented on Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler" eli.thegreenplace.net/202... · Posted by u/cui

muth02446 · 11 days ago

Pros: * uses Python and recursive descent parsing * separates front and backend via an IR * generates ELF binaries (either x86 or ARM) * meant for real world use

Cons: * more complex * not written in a tutorial style

muth02446 commented on Durin is a library for reading and writing the Dwarf debugging format github.com/tmcgilchrist/d... · Posted by u/mooreds

woodruffw · 20 days ago

DWARF is such a neat little format. I have a soft spot for the "line program" table, which is a little state machine that allows DWARF to efficiently encode a line/column correspondence for virtual addresses.

muth02446 · 19 days ago

Surely, you are joking about the "little" part.

The Dwarf 5 document is over 400 pages long (c.f. https://dwarfstd.org/doc/DWARF5.pdf).

muth02446 commented on We haven't seen ZFS checksum failures for a couple of years utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/psxuaw

muth02446 · a month ago

What I am curious about: where zfs checksum failures the only symptom of the bad disks or where there SMART failures as well?

muth02446 commented on Our Farewell from Google Play secuso.aifb.kit.edu/engli... · Posted by u/shakna

muth02446 · 5 months ago

I am in a similar situation and my solution was to switch to PWAs. I translated the apps from Java to Dart and rolled my own UI with straight forward HTML.

My apps do not use notifications which seems to be an issue with PWAs. A real downside for me is the lack of a simple i18n story and I will likely roll my own.

On the plus side: * PWAs can be easily packaged into an APK using: https://www.pwabuilder.com/ * my apps can now be used on IOs and regular web browsers

muth02446 commented on JPEG XL and Google's War Against It (2024) vale.rocks/posts/jpeg-xl-... · Posted by u/nayuki

wronex · 6 months ago

I’ve tried to convince all my friends to switch off Chrome for years. It’s an impossible battle. I don’t understand.

muth02446 · 6 months ago

Each new decoder represents an increase in attack surface which is why not all video/audio formats supported by ffmpeg are enabled in Chrome. This is despite Chrome having ffmpeg as a depency. [caveat: this was the status quo when I last checked a couple of years ago]

muth02446 commented on Rust compiler performance kobzol.github.io/rust/rus... · Posted by u/mellosouls

norir · 6 months ago

Compiler performance must be considered up front in language design. It is nearly impossible to fix once the language reaches a certain size without it being a priority. I recently saw here the observation that one can often get a 2x performance improvement through optimization, but 10x requires redesigning the architecture.

Rust can likely never be rearchitected without causing a disastrous schism in the community, so it seems probable that compilation will always be slow.

muth02446 · 6 months ago

The key to unlocking a 10x improvement to compilation speeds will like be multithreading. I vaguely remember that LLVM struggled with this and I am not sure where it stands today. On the frontend side language (not compiler) design will affect how well things can be parallelized, e.g. forward declatations probably help, mandatory interprocedural anaylyses probably hurt.

Having said that, we are in a bad shape when golang compiling 40kLOC in 2s is a celebrated achievement. Assuming this is single threaded on a 2GHz machine, we 2s * 2GHz / 40kLOC = 100k [cycles] / LOC

That seems like a lot of compute and I do not see how this cannot be improved substantially.

Shameless plug: the Cwerg language (http://cwerg.org) is very focussed on compilation speeds.

muth02446 commented on The Danish Ministry of Digitalization Is Switching to Linux and LibreOffice politiken.dk/viden/tech/a... · Posted by u/nogajun

dkga · 6 months ago

Speaking completely off the cuff here, but I suspect that as government applications move to be web-based, perhaps there could be another wave of Linux adoption since all it would take essentially is a functioning browser.

muth02446 · 6 months ago

I am puzzled that they not already have moved to the web. Also speaking off the cuff: what are the main reasons for using word documents in government? If it is mostly communication with other parts of the government or the public, shouldn't this be email which requires very little functionality compared to word.

I can see niche cases, like laws where you want change tracking or very long reports but that does not seem to apply to most government employees. Somehow I feel I missing something big, maybe there is a lot of automation built around word documents?

muth02446 commented on Small Programs and Languages ratfactor.com/cards/pl-sm... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

muth02446 · 6 months ago

Another small language is Cwerg [1] (tutorial: [2]) A C-like low level language with a Python inspired syntax.

The frontend has a self imposed line budget of 10kLOC.

[1] http://cwerg.org [2] https://github.com/robertmuth/Cwerg/blob/master/FE/Docs/tuto...

muth02446 commented on Google to back three new nuclear projects esgtoday.com/google-to-ba... · Posted by u/aburan28

muth02446 · 7 months ago

I view nuclear as a prudent diversification of energy sources: What happens if some supervolcano erupts, and because of the ashes significantly less sunlight reaches the surface of the earth. Presumably, there will also be less wind then.

muth02446 commented on Four Years of Jai (2024) smarimccarthy.is/posts/20... · Posted by u/xixixao

GoblinSlayer · 8 months ago

I don't get what's up with the runtime hysteria. All languages have a runtime maybe except for assembler. And linux kernel itself is infamous for being not C by a large margin. And in general remove something important from any program and it will stop working.

muth02446 · 8 months ago

If you do embedded work, you often want to be in total control of all memory allocations. So it is good to know that the compiler will not produce some invisible heap allocations and there is a useful subset of the standard libray that does not use them either.