681–690 of 929 posts
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I was saying a commanders accuracy with a rifle isn’t relevant to their ability to decide tactics or strategy. Nothing you’ve said contradicts what I said.
But the commander hasn't tried a machine gun and thinks that a bayonet charge will still work like it did before.
Lumping C and C++ together implies much about the use of the language - "modern" C++ features go out of their way to avoid memory unsafe and bug-prone operations (avoiding raw pointer arithmetic, no manual new/delete memory management etc). Comparing Rust against the overlapping subset of "C" and "C++" is rather disingenuous. It's like writing /everything/ in Rust in an unsafe block and avoiding all the tools that ac…
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> If Rusties want Rust to displace C... simplify your dependency chains. Get a build system that's easily workable without an Internet connection and recent TLS support. Make it easy for beginners to build out Rust infrastructure for OpenVMS on Itanium, Solaris on SPARC, z/OS, MorphOS, GNU/Hurd, and a 20-year-old budget PDA running a custom OS on an SH4 CPU. C is welcome to that niche IMO. The priority is getting peo…
Most of those applications would probably be just fine with a GC language, so the cognitive load of doing things safely in any non-GC language is probably a waste.
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What is the advantage of a slotmap style approach vs references? It seems a bit manual and error prone, and the errors risk being silent references to wrong objects that may result in security vulnerabilities or data corruption.
The advantage w.r.t references is that with Slotmap, you can express cyclical data structures, whereas with references you can't. The advantage w.r.t plain Vec and juggling integer indices is that unlike integers, Slotmap keeps track of the "identity" of the stored object; the keys are unique to that object, and you can't accidentally refer to a wrong object with them. > errors risk being silent references to wrong o…
A generation count indeed could mitigate "use after free" style bugs, but may have a high false negative ratio if many/most objects have same generation. But a glance at slotmap docs didn't yield any hits for a generation I'd being used, do you have a specific link?
There are new programs being written daily in COBOL and Fortran, and I'm fairly certain that I see new PL/I floating around occasionally. C and C++ aren't going anywhere anytime soon. Love them, hate them, want to burn them with fire, they're here for a long, long time. Leaving that aside, I was still hitting Rust "oh look the developer of this crate on which the entire universe depends still assumes that everything…
The fact that Rust has a whole other ecosystem is the main thing that gives me pause. For all their faults, C and C++ targets the ecosystem you have: gems, pip, Conan, Nix, ...doesn't matter. They don't expect you to port to a new ecosystem. They can contort to meet your needs. Herb Sutter's latest proposal and, to a slightly lesser degree, Carbon are more interesting in that respect.
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Here's an example of C++ code written intentionally with all the latest C++ features: https://gist.github.com/caiorss/c7db87df674326793431a14006aa... It looks pretty much nothing like a C program doing the same job. A lot of those features were made to make C++ a safer language to use. Eg, with a construction like: for(const auto& it : ast){ You can't accidentally walk past the end of the array by going one item too…
Why are spaces randomly omitted for language constructs like if and for, and reference type &s left aligned?!
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This means that you have array accesses that cause index out of bounds fatal errors instead of invalid pointer dereferencing that causes fatal segmentation failure errors. Detecting this kind of bugs reliably is a very good thing, but preventing such errors (and optimizing away bounds checking if possible) would be better.
Invalid pointer dereferencing isn't guaranteed to cause segfaults, you might just get garbage memory or nasal demons from LLVM handling undefined behavior. That's the key advantage of using integers (or a GC'd language) - it's memory safe.
Or worse, actual data belonging to someone else. If the integer is a user id, and you delete an user, reuse it for another user, the former user might see data for another use. That is a big security issue
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C# is the new King of game development.
Only if you're using Unity / Monogame / other custom game engines that use C# as their scripting language. Unity (IL2CPP) and Monogame (BRUTE) transpile the C# (byte)code to C++ to be able to deploy to consoles and the C# version they support lags several versions behind. I don't think we can call C# "the new King of gamedev" until it is officially supported by console makers but it seems unrealistic for a couple of…
Calling him the Azure CTO is strictly accurate, but HN readers probably know Mark Russinovich better as one of the primary developers of sysinternals[1]. I bring that up to highlight the weight of his opinion: Russinovich is legendary in terms of his systems programming contributions. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sysinternals
absolutely! came here to say just that. also the excellent book "windows internals", which is kind of like the bsd red book, or the magic garden svr4 book, but for systems derived from the windows nt kernel. but perhaps his best work is this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blu... a screensaver that produces a realistic blue screen (kernel panic) for the version of the operating system and ke…
> Note: before you can run Bluescreen on Windows 95 or 98, you must copy \winnt\system32\ntoskrnl.exe from a Windows 2000 system to your \Windows directory
There be dragons
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With all due respect, this is coming from a Win32 API C programmer who happens to save the code in files with .cpp extension. In other words, not familiar with modern C++.
What's wrong with .cpp extension?