Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Cap’n Proto

capnproto.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 194 posts

Re: Cap’n Proto

#51

Post by kentonv »

zump wrote: post #42
kentonv wrote: post #11

Hi all, Cap'n Proto author here. Thanks for the post. Just wanted to note that although Cap'n Proto hasn't had a blog post or official release in a while, development is active as part of the Sandstorm project ( https://sandstorm.io ). Cap'n Proto -- including the RPC system -- is used extensively in Sandstorm. Sandboxed Sandstorm apps in fact do all their communications with the outside world through a single Cap'n…

Why did you leave Google?

Well, I could write a lot about this, but...

In general, because I felt there was too much resistance to me pursuing ideas that I wanted to pursue. Google has become increasingly top-down, whereas it was fairly bottom-up when I started in 2005. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but I felt that I personally would be happier running a startup where I could call the shots.

FWIW, if you just want to write code, be comfortable, and make a crapton of money, and you don't care if you're implementing someone else's ideas, I highly recommend working for Google. That's not meant to be sarcastic or disparaging -- I totally respect that approach and there are days when I wish that were me. But if you have ideas of your own and you won't be happy unless you see them implemented... it probably won't happen at Google.

(To be fair, some people at Google would surely argue that my problem is that my ideas are crazy and bad, and I don't have any firm evidence -- yet -- that they are wrong.)

Re: Cap’n Proto

#52

Post by Twirrim »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #50
kentonv wrote: post #11

Hi all, Cap'n Proto author here. Thanks for the post. Just wanted to note that although Cap'n Proto hasn't had a blog post or official release in a while, development is active as part of the Sandstorm project ( https://sandstorm.io ). Cap'n Proto -- including the RPC system -- is used extensively in Sandstorm. Sandboxed Sandstorm apps in fact do all their communications with the outside world through a single Cap'n…

Treating Windows like a red headed step child is why I, with great disappointment, passed on Cap'n'Proto. Cross platform libraries that really only care about a single platform is an endless source of frustration. :(

Writing software that is safely and gracefully cross-platform is a pain in the neck :-/

Re: Cap’n Proto

#53

Post by cmrdporcupine »

morecoffee wrote: post #34
wtbob wrote: post #31

> The Cap’n Proto encoding is appropriate both as a data interchange format and an in-memory representation, so once your structure is built, you can simply write the bytes straight out to disk! Eh, I'd rather pay the cost of serialisation once and deserialisation once, and then access my data for as close to free as possible, rather than relying on a compiler to actually inline calls properly. > Integers use little-…

> Eh, I'd rather pay the cost of serialisation once and deserialisation once, and then access my data for as close to free as possible, rather than relying on a compiler to actually inline calls properly. The thing is, as close to free as possible is surprisingly expensive. Protobuf's varint encoding is extremely branchy, and hurts performance in a datacenter environment (where bandwidth is free, and CPU is expensive…

ARM is bi-endian but my understanding is almost everybody is running it little-endian these days.

Re: Cap’n Proto

#54

Post by sandGorgon »

How do you pronounce the name? If libreoffice is bad.. This name is absolutely impossible.

Is it captain? Is it cap+n+proto?

A lot of collaboration is verbal - people sit around and talk about stuff. I don't know if it is a fun take on an American word... But it is impossible to use in the rest of the world.

I really wish you would call it something else... Unless it is personal for you :(

Re: Cap’n Proto

#56

Post by haneefmubarak »

sandGorgon wrote: post #54

How do you pronounce the name? If libreoffice is bad.. This name is absolutely impossible. Is it captain? Is it cap+n+proto? A lot of collaboration is verbal - people sit around and talk about stuff. I don't know if it is a fun take on an American word... But it is impossible to use in the rest of the world. I really wish you would call it something else... Unless it is personal for you :(

So yeah, in the states, we have this cereal called Cap'n Crunch that some people love. I think he was making a pun out of that.

The pronunciation would thus be "cap [the sound the letter 'n' makes] crunch".

Re: Cap’n Proto

#57

Post by wtbob »

kentonv wrote: post #37
wtbob wrote: post #31

> The Cap’n Proto encoding is appropriate both as a data interchange format and an in-memory representation, so once your structure is built, you can simply write the bytes straight out to disk! Eh, I'd rather pay the cost of serialisation once and deserialisation once, and then access my data for as close to free as possible, rather than relying on a compiler to actually inline calls properly. > Integers use little-…

Big-endian vs. little-endian is an ancient flamewar that isn't going to go away any time soon, but sure, let's argue. Once you've spent as much time twiddling bits as I have (as the author of proto2 and Cap'n Proto), you start to realize that little endian is much easier to work with than big-endian. For example: - To reinterpret a 64-bit number as 32-bit in BE, you have to add 4 bytes to your pointer. In LE, the poi…

> To reinterpret a 64-bit number as 32-bit in BE, you have to add 4 bytes to your pointer. In LE, the pointer doesn't change.

But one shouldn't do that very often: those are two different types. The slight cost of adding a pointer is negligible.

> Just about any arithmetic operation on integers (e.g. adding) starts from the least-significant bits and moves up. It's nice if that can mean iterating forward from the start instead of backwards from the end, e.g. when implementing a "bignum" library.

-- is a thing, just as ++ is.

> There's really no good argument for big-endian encoding except that it's the ordering that we humans use in writing.

That's like saying, 'there's really no good argument for pumping nitrogen-oxygen mixes into space stations except that it's the mixture we humans use to breathe.'

It's simplicity itself for a computer to do big-endian arithmetic; it's horrible pain for a human being who has to read a little-endian listing. A computer can be made to do the right thing. Who is the master: the computer or the man?

Re: Cap’n Proto

#58

Post by kentonv »

sandGorgon wrote: post #54

How do you pronounce the name? If libreoffice is bad.. This name is absolutely impossible. Is it captain? Is it cap+n+proto? A lot of collaboration is verbal - people sit around and talk about stuff. I don't know if it is a fun take on an American word... But it is impossible to use in the rest of the world. I really wish you would call it something else... Unless it is personal for you :(

CAP-ən PRO-to

But "Captain Proto" is acceptable if you have trouble with the contraction.

Or you can also think of it as "Cap-and-Proto". Which is an intentional pun ("capabilities and protocols", or something).

Googling either of these will get you to the right place, so I think it gets the job done.

Re: Cap’n Proto

#60

Post by kentonv »

wtbob wrote: post #57
kentonv wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big-endian vs. little-endian is an ancient flamewar that isn't going to go away any time soon, but sure, let's argue. Once you've spent as much time twiddling bits as I have (as the author of proto2 and Cap'n Proto), you start to realize that little endian is much easier to work with than big-endian. For example: - To reinterpret a 64-bit number as 32-bit in BE, you have to add 4 bytes to your pointer. In LE, the poi…

> To reinterpret a 64-bit number as 32-bit in BE, you have to add 4 bytes to your pointer. In LE, the pointer doesn't change. But one shouldn't do that very often: those are two different types. The slight cost of adding a pointer is negligible. > Just about any arithmetic operation on integers (e.g. adding) starts from the least-significant bits and moves up. It's nice if that can mean iterating forward from the sta…

That line of argument suggests you'd be happier with a human-readable format like JSON. Which is another eternal flamewar that we aren't likely to resolve here. Needless to say I like binary formats. :)
Post reply on HN