Viewing profile — ljackman

That's a good point. Generally, I opt for languages that either compile away their nicities to avoid runtime hits, such as Rust being compiled to WASM, or languages that bring nici…

`Async`/`await` or something like Kotlin's `suspend` are great language features for certain domains in which a developer needs to manage blocking system calls: in lower-level lang…

The whitelisting looks great. Even with the remaining concerns I raised in the other comment, the ability to whitelist only allowed domains for network connections is a massive ste…

That's a good start, supporting the dropping of privileges after performing something on startup. What about keeping the network allowed in the layer handling, say, inbound HTTP co…

It looks like a good evolutionary improvement over Node.js. However, I have a concern about its security claims. Perhaps someone on the project can allay these concerns. My brief s…

I wonder whether Project Loom will create a split in the Kotlin ecosystem between coroutine-based concurrency and Loom lightweight thread-based concurrency. Java will have a simila…

There might be, but unfortunately I don't know it. I learnt Java initially from the first edition of Just Java, read from various other sources about the 1.5 and 1.6 additions it d…

Thanks for the clarification on the final NRT behaviour. Just to say, my point about "didn't align with good taste" was itself lacking taste. I'm sure each of those features I crit…

Fair enough; I do miss keyword and default arguments from C# when using Java. A long list of overloads and argument forwarding to fake default arguments gets old.

FWIW, I could have produced an equally-long list of Java flaws. I'm not terribly attached to either language. I just wanted to challenge the meme that "C# is a better Java" I hear …

These C# issues arguably demonstrate haphazard additions that didn't align with good taste: * Too many overlapping concepts for referring to code by value and defining them inline:…

While Java's slow and cautious evolution frustrates developers, it still arguably demonstrates longer-term thinking than the constant accrual of features in its contemporaries such…

Agreed. A lot of serialisation support in mainstream languages seem to stand in stark contrast to the principles of langsec [1]. This bug reminded me a bit of Heartbleed actually; …

I’m glad we’re seeing so many security vulnerabilities being exposed in the lower-level parts of the consumer OSes whose security we all take for granted. Doing writeups of comprom…

By ‘constant stack value’, I was referring to ‘effectively constant’ stack values, i.e. ones who aren’t reassigned in the scope or passed by mutable reference (or indeed are but ar…

You’re completely correct. I was conflating the ODR-adhering standard ‘inline’ keyword with the various inlining pragma in some compilers that actually are about solely forcing inl…

The key difference between `const` and the `register` and `inline` keywords is that, despite all of them often flagging optimisations that the compiler can often work out anyway, `…

Some templating languages such as Jsonnet[0] add built-in templating and just enough programmability to cover basic operations like templating and iteration. I originally felt it w…

Apple has been slowly phasing out GPLed software from their own software, such as Catalina's migration from Bash to Z Shell, but even writing third party apps with the GPL has appa…

My experience of Bamboo has included: * Broken base Ubuntu images being recommended by Atlassian as the default for agent Image configuration, only to be fixed to a usable state mo…

I agree that CPython and V8 omitting the ability to juggle multiple stacks is a mistake. For higher-level languages, undelimited coroutines or continuations allow for very useful a…

Most common coroutine implementations, such as JavaScript's and Python's, are delimited or "symmetric". This means the most obvious implementation is in terms of compiler transform…

Yes, macOS seems to be heading in the right direction (even if it means frustrating legitimate usage patterns at times). In particular, I like that it kept it simple by either an a…

Good point. The lack of visibility into today's blackbox commodity hardware is frightening, such as Intel ME. It's even worse when that hardware is listening to external commands v…