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Welcome Chris Lattner

tesla.com

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Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#211

Post by jolux »

xenadu02 wrote: post #202
madeofpalk wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone wasnt world changing? I mean sure, you could make the argument that if it wasnt Apple with the iPhone it would have been someone else, but it's undeniably daft to think that the iPhone didn't lead to a complete change in not only consumer electronics (mobile phones), but also so many services around it. It's well documented that Android was going to be Blackberry-ish, then they pivoted to be iPhone-ish after t…

The iPhone broke the carrier's backs. Before the iPhone the carrier was the customer, not you. They dictated features. They had final approval over the awful Java applets on phones. They also set the app prices and took a huge cut. Very rarely is a new technology useful in abstract; the inventor of the steering wheel made a contribution but without the rest of the car it is meaningless. Touch screens existed, sure. T…

Who are you replying to here?

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#212

Post by devsquid »

pjmlp wrote: post #186
devsquid wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I get your point, programming language communities all have a certain level of fan-boyism. However I find Swift's community to be particularly abhorrent. I stopped partcipating when people started to ask if certain codes is "Swifty" and people would judge the merit of something on whether its "Swifty". It also got tiring with how militant they were with other programming languages, especially Java.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#213

Post by exDM69 »

devsquid wrote: post #153
webjprgm wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I would say Swift is the kind of robust that is needed for safety critical software, but it is a nice step forward for application code. It mostly forces you to deal with things safely while still allowing Objective-C dynamic behaviors when you need to get around the restrictions (often to interact with other Obj-C code). So, yes I can see why one would call Lattner at the forefront of making more reliab…

Sure Lattner and Musk are interesting people, but I find the level of hero worship in the tech industry to be sickening. Having used compilers for a few new languages (Rust, Go, Dart, Kotlin, Swift). Swift is the only one I've had any issues with as well as Swift seems to be the only language to have adopted the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. I dunno, I just don't see the argument.

Lattner is best known for starting the whole LLVM project. Swift is just a small side project in comparison, it just got adopted by Apple for some reason.

LLVM is one of the most influential pieces of software of the past decade. Hero worship isn't good but credit where credit is due.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#214

Post by devsquid »

jolux wrote: post #205
devsquid wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No I'm not confusing them. I'm responding directly to the comment that Chris lattner represents a more measured approach to software development than is tradition in the tech industry. I don't think Swift stands to gain wide spread traction outside of Apple orientated app development. Aside from a lack of stability, Apple is to well known for boxing its competitors out. I've used and loved their products my entire li…

>I don't think Swift stands to gain wide spread traction outside of Apple orientated app development. It already is though, there are several Linux web frameworks etc. It's open source and community run so I'm not sure how they're planning to box out competitors from it.

There are some web frameworks that are indevelopment. That does not mean Swift has gained any traction. Also having toyed around with one, the experience was not great.

When writing a server, I would take Go over Swift anyday. It out preforms it, uses less memory, its simpiler, oh and it uses a "tradiontal" GC.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#215

Post by tajen »

laser wrote: post #175
naaaaak wrote: post #161

Apple has a car project. Autopilot must be one of its core features. But Apple would not create a VP-level position for Autopilot or any one feature for any of their products (even if they it called something else for secrecy/generalization reasons). This move increases his compensation and clout. Post-Tesla, he'll only have VP or founder titles elsewhere, never anything lower-level (unless he gets his old job back).…

I thought Apple's car project was dead? Now autopilot is the one feature they're building? http://www.motortrend.com/news/apple-car-dead-software-shift...

Both are correct: Apple's car project is dead, Apple is on autopilot.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#216

Post by hamstergene »

pjmlp wrote: post #191
hamstergene wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

ARC is automatic memory management. "The Garbage Collection Handbook", chapter 5 http://gchandbook.org/

Different approaches to memory management differ in extent of how much of programmer's job they automate.

Garbage collectors are fully automatic and rarely if ever require to mind anything; automatic RC does almost everything but requires programmer to analyze and annotate some things as 'weak'; manual RC requires a lot more programmer's effort while still technically being "automatic"; and manual memory management means the programmer does everything.

Automatic/manual is a scale, not a boolean yes/no, and the point is that ARC lies on it a bit closer to manual than garbage collectors.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#217

Post by devsquid »

exDM69 wrote: post #213
devsquid wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure Lattner and Musk are interesting people, but I find the level of hero worship in the tech industry to be sickening. Having used compilers for a few new languages (Rust, Go, Dart, Kotlin, Swift). Swift is the only one I've had any issues with as well as Swift seems to be the only language to have adopted the "move fast and break things" philosophy of Silicon Valley. I dunno, I just don't see the argument.

Lattner is best known for starting the whole LLVM project. Swift is just a small side project in comparison, it just got adopted by Apple for some reason. LLVM is one of the most influential pieces of software of the past decade. Hero worship isn't good but credit where credit is due.

Oh yea LLVM and Clang are incredible pieces of software! He is truly a master.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#218

Post by coldtea »

jlarocco wrote: post #166
coldtea wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The point is that Apple's been dropping the ball a lot lately. They might, but the examples for that are bad themselves: > Macbook with less ports Which has always been something Apple pushed for. Dropping deprecated ports early (to complains) and adopting new ones. Few doubt USB-C is the future, even if they complain about the dongles. > copy&paste iPhone with no originality The iPhone, like the iPod before it, ha…

My counterpoint is the simple fact that we're even discussing this. Apple products used to "just work," and now they're a mess. I've never considered myself a diehard Apple fan, but over the years I've spent thousands and thousands of dollars on Apple products. From a 1 Gb iPad shuffle all the way up to a Retina MBP, and quite a few things in between. I don't need to argue if Apple is going down hill because I'm seei…

>My counterpoint is the simple fact that we're even discussing this. Apple products used to "just work," and now they're a mess.

My counterpoint is that I've been following Apple news ever since I was enthused with the idea of a NeXT-based OS X back in 2001, and know that "the simple fact that we're even discussing this" doesn't mean much.

People, pundits, media have "discussing" that Apple "lost the plot", "is doomed", "can't compete anymore", etc. all the time, from the introduction to the iPod until now.

Maybe this time it really is. But NOT because people are discussing this, because "people discussing this" has been a constant, not a differentiating factor for these times.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#219

Post by amiga-workbench »

devsquid wrote: post #198
pjmlp wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dock and launchd were rewritten in Swift for Sierra. There is a WWDC session talking about it.

Well that doesn't bode well ;) Sierra's dock is sooo buggy. I have to restart my machine numerous times a day because the dock stops working, literally doesn't work lol. I'm sure theres a way to restart just the dock app, but eh i've been quite busy. Sierra has been one of the buggiest version of Mac I can remember using. I would surprised if they actually did tho. I know someone did some static analysis of the apps…

The dock is a separate process, as is Finder, you can just kill them.

I have to stomp on coreaudiod a few times a month because my USB DAC stops responding.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#220

Post by PinguTS »

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…

If you want to talk about safety and reliability in automotive, then we talk about Autosar[1].

One of the concepts is to prevent the use of any dynamic behavior, which means you don't need any garbage collection at all. Because garbage collection is not predictable. It can be good and bad, but even a good one is not predictable.

Embedded design and development is completely different to classical IT. For IT that sounds archaic. But it always proved right at the end.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUTOSAR

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