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Welcome Chris Lattner

tesla.com

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Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#181

Post by davidgay »

abalone wrote: post #70

What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…

I like LLVM. But in the world of programming languages/compilers, someone like Xavier Leroy (a real, proved correct C compiler) is much more a name that I would associate with a drive for "software correctness and reliability".

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#182

Post by valleyer »

dwaite wrote: post #171
shiny wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much none of Apple's current software is written in Swift though, from what I can tell.

Actually a fair bit is in Sierra. Apple decided apparently not to invest resources in targeting 32-bit platform support, so they have had to hold off shipping software relying on it until the platforms drop 32-bit support. Sierra did that last year, and I'd put $5 on iOS 11 doing that as well.

Sierra did not drop support for 32-bit apps. It doesn't support 32-bit hardware, but that change was made many releases ago (Mac OS X Lion IIRC).

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#183

Post by dwaite »

dwaite wrote: post #171
shiny wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much none of Apple's current software is written in Swift though, from what I can tell.

Actually a fair bit is in Sierra. Apple decided apparently not to invest resources in targeting 32-bit platform support, so they have had to hold off shipping software relying on it until the platforms drop 32-bit support. Sierra did that last year, and I'd put $5 on iOS 11 doing that as well.

Correct, I should have said "the platforms dropping 32-bit processor support".

The ability to run 32-bit applications means that preexisting libraries cannot incorporate Swift code yet.

The "application may slow down your phone" warnings that users are getting with 32-bit apps this year is a pretty strong indicator that Apple is going to remove support for running 32-bit apps completely for iOS 11 or 12. They previously had a deadline for apps to have 64-bit version submitted, but backed off the ultimatum for now.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#184

Post by hamstergene »

devsquid wrote: post #110
abalone wrote: post #70

What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…

ARC is a whole debate, but the one thing it is not is simple and I would argue its more error prone than a traditional GC. I've used it for most of my career and I have seen what sloppy/unaware coding can do to it. Lattner is a well known expert on compilers. Having used Swift since its inception, I would call into question the reliability of the Swift LLVM compiler. In its current state (3.0.2) its absolutely terrib…

ARC is a tradeoff between manual and automatic memory management. Requring a little bit more care from programmer is intentional, not a disadvantage as you picture it, it is a price for not having, you know, GC. GC is less error prone not for free but at the price of eating CPU and memory, which in the world of mobile devices equal less battery life, so it is quite desirable for iPhones and MacBooks software not to have it.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#186

Post by pjmlp »

devsquid wrote: post #138
chris_7 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is downvoted presumably for lack of information, but it's pretty much true. The Swift compiler segfaults very frequently. I do find this amusing in that it's the compiler for a theoretically largely-memory-safe language (yes the compiler is written in C++, it's still funny). The syntax highlighter in Xcode, which is driven by the same stuff, also crashes, which breaks autocompletion and even indentation . Using…

Oh? I meant it as a srs question. I wasn't sure what parts I should include. But thanks for essentially saying most of it. I should mention I also find the community to be sorta toxic. They are so focused on Swift being the one language to rule them all and they use terms like "Swifty".

All language communities do that.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#187

Post by pjmlp »

devsquid wrote: post #144
shiny wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much none of Apple's current software is written in Swift though, from what I can tell.

If I remember right, its just the calculator app. Lol....

The dock and launchd were rewritten in Swift for Sierra.

There is a WWDC session talking about it.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#188

Post by igorigor »

solipsism wrote: post #177
Cyph0n wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OP has or has not achieved is irrelevant in my opinion. I think it's better form to just refute the criticism and leave OP out of it. But it's up to you of course.

In the meanwhile you've taken the entire conversation off course to serve as the politeness police.

Because forbid we have politeness and etiquette in advanced societies

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#190

Post by pjmlp »

abalone wrote: post #70

What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…

> LLVM enabled ARC, a beautifully simple approach to memory management that removed much (not all) of the need for the developer to implement details in code, while providing high efficiency and, perhaps even more importantly, predictable performance (no garbage collection pauses). These are all essential for safety-critical realtime software.

A GC algorithm known since the early days of Lisp GC research and used in languages like Mesa/Cedar in the late 70's.

I can think of lots of other examples, like how VB, Delphi and C++ Builder interfaced with COM in the mid-90's.

Yes, ARC PR made automatic memory management to those without background in compiler research more easy to accept, specially if they weren't aware of the stability issues that trying to implement a tracing GC in Objective-C semantics meant.

However it goes without saying, that Lattner is really brilliant and his work on LLVM as a compiler building tool, as well as, clang in regards to improving the status quo of C static analysis tooling and compiler error messages, is really notable.

In regards to ARC, maybe also in terms of PR, as now there is a whole generation of developers that thinks reference counting isn't garbage collection.

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