291–300 of 520 posts
Good news they adopted Rust as Tier-1 language. I hope their Weather app stop consuming more than 1GB RAM https://www.notebookcheck.net/Windows-11-s-built-in-Weather-...
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There's premature optimisation, where you write a whole bunch of complicated code to avoid cloning an Arc . And then there's "premature optimisation" where you skip any consideration for performance until it becomes a problem. The latter is usually what people who use the quote "premature optimisation is the root of all evil" think it means. Don't just keep calm and clone, consider what you're cloning and why, and th…
Isn’t the latter what Knuth meant? Such a slippery slope between “consideration of performance” and optimization.
> Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.
Notice the aspects and the reasons for knuth's "premature optimization". Is it making the code harder to debug and read? Is it a non-critical path?
If an optimization doesn't impact readability or debugability (for example, picking a datastructure that fits the problem instead of just using a List for everything). Then you should do it.
I see the quote so often pulled by people that want to justify inserting a n^2 algorithm when a log(n) solution is either the same amount of code or 1 line extra.
There's also important context about the era knuth was programming in. Optimization in the era of knuth was targeting the hardware and tickling things like the CPU cache and memory in a very specific way. It was things like clever bit manipulation and packing to save memory. That's the context. In modern terms it'd be "don't use SIMD intrinsics until you know you need them". It wouldn't be "Don't think about algorithmic complexity" which is where I most often see that kludge deployed.
My advice to the Rust team: you're going to get shoved so I hope you're good at shoving back. At least you don't have to worry about stevesi (unless you're with a16z or have kids).
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Real numbers. I can't say what directly, but you can make a good guess if you read my comment history. (I don't think this would be worth your time, but you could)
Btw grok found out in less than ten seconds what place you refer to and likely what software within that company. Things that wouldn't be worth your time before are trivial these days with LLMs.
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I just tried it. It works fine.
The software can read from the phone without unlocking it?
Oddly, I find the weather widget refreshes much more often than the app. I'll tap on the widget, which is up to date, which launches the weather app, which could be from yesterday, and have to wait while it refreshes. Apparently the app doesn't implement any background refresh at all, which is really weird.
Those interested in this may find the following articles of interest: Microsoft goals [edit: err, Microsoft hiring manager vision-casting goal ] to convert 1 billion lines of code to rust by 2030 via automated tooling enabling "1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code": https://thenewstack.io/microsofts-bold-goal-replace-1b-lines... DARPA work towards automating converting C code to Rust using a mix of 6 differen…
There have also been repeated statements from NSA & CISA that they recommend all development should be done in memory safe languages. It's abundantly clear that there is a strong headwind towards memory safety, whether that's Rust or GC'd languages.
C++ is still indicated for systems that are optimizing for performance and scalability characteristics, since it intrinsically requires a lot of "unsafe" constructs.
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What were you working on that cost a billion dollars to rewrite? Or was that hyperbole?
Real numbers. I can't say what directly, but you can make a good guess if you read my comment history. (I don't think this would be worth your time, but you could)
Anyway, even if that were true, rewrites are becoming drastically cheaper, simpler, and more correct with AI. The Bun rewrite is the largest experiment and seems to be 5-10x cheaper and completed ~100x faster and these costs are likely to come down further. So your claimed $1B rewrite today costs $100M and carries less risk. In 5 years it'll probably cost at most $10M and be finished drastically more quickly. And the vast majority of software doesn't cost $1B to translate.
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There have also been repeated statements from NSA & CISA that they recommend all development should be done in memory safe languages. It's abundantly clear that there is a strong headwind towards memory safety, whether that's Rust or GC'd languages.
A headwind makes it harder to advance in the direction you're going. I think you might have meant to say "there is a strong tailwind towards memory safety".
nit: except in aviation
This makes strategic sense in multiple ways: 1. Rust's memory safety design will help Microsoft improve a gigantic portfolios of products that have been known to have lots of CVEs and 70% of them are memory safety issues, according to Azure CTO Mark Russinovich's talk at RustCon last year.[1] 2. Windows 11's forceful push to retire millions of legacy PC hardware by putting Windows 10 EOL last October was absurd for m…
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You can compile any old code with newer rustc as long as old project does not use unstable features that have changed/went away. What are you on? I recently recompiled project from 2015 with latest stable rust just fine. All breaking changesin rust done via editions and you can mix-and-match editions.
I suspect GP is using system rustc to build random projects off of github and doesn't use one of the distros that actually updates rustc, like Fedora, SuSE or Arch. Then the conversation is about forward compatibility, whether developers should wait X amount of time before using new std APIs or features, and whether the ease of using rustup and project expectation of it being accessible is reasonable or not.