81–90 of 270 posts
We have solved the better C issue, but nobody seems keen on solving the better compiler issue Why do we still have to recompile the whole program everytime we make a change, the only project i am aware of who wants to tackle this is Zig with binary patching, and that's imo where we should focus our effort on.. C3 does look interesting tho, the idea of ABI compatibility with C is pretty ingenious, you get to tap into…
" the C-like for programmers who like C." Sounds intriguing. But then, the first thing I noticed in their example is a double-colon scope operator. I understand that it's part of the culture (and Rust, C#, and many other languages), but I find the syntax itself ugly. I dunno. Maybe I have the visual equivalent of misophonia, in addition to the auditory version, but :: and x I like C. But I abhor C++ with a passion, p…
As a long time lisper I can't stand how much syntax languages have and I think of excess syntax as a sign of a childish mind, but what can you do?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s giving you an expression capability so that you can state your intent, in a standardized way, that other tooling can build off. But it’s recognizing that the degree of enforcement depends on applied context. A big company team might want to enforce them rigidly, but a widely used tool like Visual Studio would not want to prevent code from running, so that folks who are introducing themselves to the paradigm can…
This is not just expressing intent. The documentation clearly states that it's UB to violate them, so you need to be extra careful when using them.
Only in "fast" mode. The developer has the choice:
> Compilation has two modes: “safe” and “fast”. Safe mode will insert checks for out-of-bounds access, null-pointer deref, shifting by negative numbers, division by zero, violation of contracts and asserts.
I keep thinking about perhaps LLMs would make writing code in these lower-level-but-far-better-performing languages in vogue. Why have claude generate a python service when you could write a rust or C3 service with compiler doing a lot of heavy lifting around memory bugs?
> Why have claude generate a python service when you could write a rust or C3 service with compiler doing a lot of heavy lifting around memory bugs? The architecture of my current project is actually a Python/Qt application which is a thin wrapper around an LLM generated Rust application. I go over almost every line of the LLM generated Rust myself, but that machine is far more skilled at generating quality Rust than…
I'm currently doing this with golang. It is not that bad of an experience. LLMs do struggle with concurrency, though. My current project has proved to be pretty challenging for LLMs to chew through.
We have solved the better C issue, but nobody seems keen on solving the better compiler issue Why do we still have to recompile the whole program everytime we make a change, the only project i am aware of who wants to tackle this is Zig with binary patching, and that's imo where we should focus our effort on.. C3 does look interesting tho, the idea of ABI compatibility with C is pretty ingenious, you get to tap into…
Separate compilation is one solution to the problem of slow compilation. Binary patching is another one. It feels a bit messy and I am sceptical that it can be maintained assuming it works at all. I think a much better approach would be too make the compilers faster. Why does compiling 1M LOC take more than 1s in unoptimized mode for any language? My guess is part of blame lies with bloated backends and meta programm…
Moreover, I view optimization as an anti-pattern in general, especially for a low level language. It is better to directly write the optimal solution and not be dependent on the compiler. If there is a real hotspot that you have identified through profiling and you don't know how to optimize it, then you can run the hotspot through an optimizing compiler and copy what it does.
The only thing stopping me from just going full C the rest of my career is cstrings and dangling pointers to raw memory that isn’t cleaned up when the process ends.
" the C-like for programmers who like C." Sounds intriguing. But then, the first thing I noticed in their example is a double-colon scope operator. I understand that it's part of the culture (and Rust, C#, and many other languages), but I find the syntax itself ugly. I dunno. Maybe I have the visual equivalent of misophonia, in addition to the auditory version, but :: and x I like C. But I abhor C++ with a passion, p…
Namespaces to me are more about naming conflict resolution and code readability, and I think of them more as prefixes to namespace member names, as opposed to those member names being part of a hierarchy. It also helps code readability to know that a::b is referring to a namespace, without having to go lookup the definition of "a", while a.b is a variable access.
That's a perspective. Are we talking about the 'bar' that comes from 'foo' or are we talking about the 'bar' that comes from 'baz'?
But another perspective is that 'foo' is important and provides several facilities that are intimately related to foo, so 'bar' is simply one of the features of foo.
> It also helps code readability to know that a::b is referring to a namespace
For you, perhaps. As someone who reads a lot of Python, I don't personally find this argument persuasive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because there’s more python on the internet to interpolate from. LLMs are not equally good at all languages
You can throw Claude at a completely private Rust code base with very specific niche requirements and conventions that are not otherwise common in Rust and it will demonstrate a remarkably strong ability to explain it and program according to the local idioms. I think your statement is based on liking a popular language, not on evidence..
Dumb question about contracts: I was reading the docs ( https://c3-lang.org/language-common/contracts/ ) and this jumped out "Contracts are optional pre- and post-condition checks that the compiler may use for static analysis, runtime checks and optimization. Note that conforming C3 compilers are not obliged to use pre- and post-conditions at all. However, violating either pre- or post-conditions is unspecified behav…
There are three main things you could do with these invariants, the exact details of how to do them, and whether people should be allowed to specify which of these things to do, and if so whether they can pick only for a whole program, per-file, per-function, or whatever, is separate.
1. Ignore the invariants. You wrote them down, a human can read them, but the machine doesn't care. You might just as well use comments or annotate the documentation, and indeed some people do.
2. Check the invariants. If the invariant wasn't true then something went wrong and we might tell somebody about that.
3. Assume these invariants are always true. Therefore the optimiser may use them to emit machine code which is smaller or faster but only works if these invariants were correct.
So for example maybe a language lets you say only that the whole program is checked, or, that the whole program can be assumed true, or, maybe the language lets you pick, function A's contract about pointer validity we're going to check at runtime, but function B's contract that you must pick an odd number, we will use assumption, we did tell you about that odd number requirement, have the optimiser emit that slightly faster machine code which doesn't work for N=0 -- because zero isn't an odd number assumption means it's now fine to use that code.