Viewing profile — mattnewport

Ironic that they used an LLM to write the article: > 42.9 units of insulin from a single photo. That’s not a rounding error. That’s a potential fatality.

It's ironic that the STL basically exists for stable sort (that's what Alex Stepanov was trying to create an efficient version of which led to most of the standard algorithms as bu…

I think a better approach might be automated performance regression tests. That's checking the property you probably actually care about directly (performance) and leaves the compi…

The disconnect is weird isn't it? The latest coding models can churn out a lot of mediocre code that more or less works if the task is sufficiently well specified, but it's not par…

Yeah, you can even use tree-sitter to implement a language server, I've done this for a custom scripting language we use at work.

Good article, thanks! Minor correction though, I think this is not quite correct: > The compiler computes the required size at compile time by summing the sizes of all locals (acco…

That's not really "fooling" the optimizer, that's kind of the point of volatile. The optimizer not making optimizations is the intended behaviour.

This might be true in the abstract but it's not true of actual compilers dealing with real world calling conventions. Absent inlining or whole program optimization, calling convent…

> Are there any debuggers that let you look at intermediate results of pipelines without modifying the code? F# in the visual studio debugger does a pretty good job of this in rece…

What's the basis for your claim that it is on an exponential growth trajectory? That's not the way it feels to me as a fairly heavy user, it feels more like an asymptotic approach …

Big little cores like on mobile or some Intel processors are really not the same thing. The little cores have the same instruction set and address the same memory as the big cores …

UI is also a sync problem if you squint a bit. React like systems are an attempt to be a sync engine between model and view in a sense. Multiplayer games too.

- Sum types / discriminated unions - Pattern matching (arguably a more flexible and general way to do the type of thing you have in your number 4 if syntax)

I use Zola, a static site generator written in Rust, and Github pages for hosting on my own domain.

Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich

This looks cool, I find myself wishing for a language and introductory tutorial that isn't so targeted at Python programmes however (though I understand from a commercial point of …

Modules, standardised in C++20, are the official solution both for the standard library and for other code but they are not universally well supported by all major compilers and bu…

This is true but in practice it's pretty common to find this sort of code seems to work fine on x64 because the compiler doesn't actually reorder things and then sometimes blows up…

Ok, that's not really what your example showed though. You seem to be relying on string interning to have two different "hello" literals refer to the same underlying object and the…

That's only because strings are immutable in Java. It's not true for reference types in general. In C++ passing a pointer by value is effectively the same as passing a reference, t…

Yeah, this is one of those things that while it may be more technically correct causes a lot of unnecessary confusion. I remember being confused by this as a C++ programmer learnin…

That's not really accurate. Component based systems are designed specifically to address situations that traditional inheritance doesn't handle well. Examples are usually something…

Not really, the data oriented design movement in games programming that eschews OOP is driven by performance concerns of traditional OOP code on areas like rendering. As a graphics…

Inheritance doesn't work well for games, that's why so many games take a component based approach like Unity, or full blown ECS.

The use case is for dedicated game servers controlled by the developer running in data centers, not clients running on player's home computers.