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Welcome Chris Lattner

tesla.com

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Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#231

Post by jnbiche »

chc wrote: post #66
bitwize wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see Musk as more of a Bushnell/Woz hybrid. He knows his shit technically, which is why good people want to work with him. Jobs knew how to delegate knowing his technical shit to others though.

Steve Jobs' contributions came from from his leadership and marketing chops, but he also had pretty good technical knowledge for a CEO. I mean, he got his start designing circuit boards at Atari.

Well, he got his start passing of Woz's circuit board designs as his own at Atari. Even he conceded that.

I do think his technical knowledge was probably higher than most give him credit for, however.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#232

Post by tbrock »

Good for him.

This is awful though. People can't really think spending time on autopilot for rich people sports cars is more important than the LLVM compiler infrastructure.

Give me a break!

Even if tesla invents cool new batteries and changes the way we think about power all of that stuff still has to run on software, that the compiler infrastructure depends on...

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#234

Post by 72deluxe »

chris_7 wrote: post #134
devsquid wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use Swift at all? -edit- I meant it as a serious question. But the person who responded to me sums up the issues.

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…

Yes I can agree with these.

I wonder if we'll have refactoring in Xcode for C++ now Lattner has gone. I wonder why they never added it.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#235

Post by grzm »

tbrock wrote: post #232

Good for him. This is awful though. People can't really think spending time on autopilot for rich people sports cars is more important than the LLVM compiler infrastructure. Give me a break! Even if tesla invents cool new batteries and changes the way we think about power all of that stuff still has to run on software, that the compiler infrastructure depends on...

Developing a system that can handle a complex, variable, real-world environment like driving surely has applications in other domains. LLVM and Swift are great contributions, and make development easier. That said, I don't see them changing software development as significantly as the possibilities opened up by systems like Tesla's autopilot.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#236

Post by 72deluxe »

devsquid wrote: post #143
webjprgm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swift has its problems but keeps getting better. I only get to use it for my at-home projects, since at work the portion of the codebase that is for iOS is Objective-C with no plans to switch any time soon. Old Obj-C too, and started by people used to programming in VB on MS platforms. So count your blessings.

I find Swift to be getting worse each year. While sure i'm blessed that I don't have to write applications in assemble, I have grown jaded towards Swift. If it wasn't because I am an iOS developer, I would happily not use the language. I have been slowly positioning myself away from doing iOS development. I feel like a massive corporation like Apple can provide better tools to write apps for their walled garden than…

What would you recommend instead?

C#? C++?

C++ has become incredibly great recently after languishing in the C++2003 period for too long.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#237

Post by hamstergene »

pjmlp wrote: post #222
hamstergene wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

The thing is, ARC is a garbage collection algorithm. There isn't anything like ARC vs GC, that is layman knowledge and just wrong from CS point of view.

ARC is not an algorithm, it a language-level feature that generates retain/release calls automatically so that the programmer does not have to. Unlike GC systems where the resulting program does run an algorithm (and wastes CPU on that), with ARC the generated program is no different as if retain/release were written manually and runs no extra code.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#238

Post by rimantas »

pjmlp wrote: post #192
adevine wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what your point is. Both ARC and GC are approaches to limit the complexity and difficulty of memory management. As such, I think it's very reasonable to compare them, because they're different approaches to the same underlying problem. FWIW, as someone who was a Java programmer for over a decade before learning Objective C right after ARC came on the scene, I greatly prefer ARC over garbage collection. I f…

ARC is a GC implementation algorithm, you probably mean tracing GC algorithm. "The Garbage Collection Handbook", chapter 5 http://gchandbook.org/

I think it is time for you to buy more books.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#239

Post by rimantas »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #99
xenadu02 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you're reading too much into things? Chris Lattner has been at Apple for over 11 years. He shepherded LLVM, Clang, lldb, and Swift. All while climbing the ranks to Director. A huge number of engineers would simply be ready to think about and do something different after that much time. You might say that Elon answers "Why Tesla?" but in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". (I have no inside k…

... in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". Seems obvious, doesn't it? Nothing interesting going on. Under Jobs, terms like "courage" and "innovation" used to mean something, like kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industry and competing against their own bestselling product. Tim Cook's idea of "courage" involves selecting a headphone jack in a CAD tool and hitting the Delete key. An…

Apple still has the best CPU on mobile. But that does not count for those who cannot see past a headphone jack.

Re: Welcome Chris Lattner

#240

Post by pjmlp »

hamstergene wrote: post #237
pjmlp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, ARC is a garbage collection algorithm. There isn't anything like ARC vs GC, that is layman knowledge and just wrong from CS point of view.

ARC is not an algorithm, it a language-level feature that generates retain/release calls automatically so that the programmer does not have to. Unlike GC systems where the resulting program does run an algorithm (and wastes CPU on that), with ARC the generated program is no different as if retain/release were written manually and runs no extra code.

That is an implementation detail of how a reference counting algorithm can be implemented.
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