271–280 of 594 posts
Well, as Jeff Atwood famously said [0], "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript". I guess that applies to embedded systems too [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Atwood
Well, wasn't Fabrice Bellard the guy who built a virtual machine with JS so that you could run Linux within the browser? https://bellard.org/jslinux/vm.html?cpu=riscv64&url=fedora33...
If this had been available in 2010, Redis scripting would have been JavaScript and not Lua. Lua was chosen based on the implementation requirements, not on the language ones... (small, fast, ANSI-C). I appreciate certain ideas in Lua, and people love it, but I was never able to like Lua, because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax and semantics without good reasons, for my taste. This creates friction for newcom…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's why I've asked about possible rust support of creating such version of normal project. The main issue, I'm unaware of comparably large rust projects without 3rdparty dependencies.
From my daily-use utilities, ripgrep and bat seem to have zero dependencies.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This indeed is not Algol (or rather C) heritage, but Fortran heritage, not memory offsets but indices in mathematical formulae. This is why R and Julia also have 1-based indexing.
Pascal. Modula-2. BASIC. Hell, Logo. Lately, yes, Julia and R. Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly. I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't love a good deal of Lua's syntax, but I do think the authors had good reasons for their choices and have generally explained them. Even if you disagree, I think "without good reasons" is overly dismissive. Personally though, I think the distinctive choices are a boon. You are never confused about what language you are writing because Lua code is so obviously Lua. There is value in this. Once you have written…
> Lua has a crucial feature that Javascript lacks: tail call optimization. I'm not familiar with Lua, but I expect tco to be a feature of the compiler, not of the language. Am I wrong?
Well, as Jeff Atwood famously said [0], "any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript". I guess that applies to embedded systems too [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Atwood
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This indeed is not Algol (or rather C) heritage, but Fortran heritage, not memory offsets but indices in mathematical formulae. This is why R and Julia also have 1-based indexing.
Pascal. Modula-2. BASIC. Hell, Logo. Lately, yes, Julia and R. Lots of systems I grew up with were 1-indexed and there's nothing wrong with it. In the context of history, C is the anomaly. I learned the Wirth languages first (and then later did a lot of programming in MOO, a prototype OO 1-indexed scripting language). Because of that early experience I still slip up and make off by 1 errors occasionally w/ 0 indexed…
Timing really is everything for making the frontpage, I posted this last night and it got no traction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I agree that it's rude to show AI output to people... in most cases (and 100% if you don't disclose it.) My simonw/research GitHub repo is deliberately separate from everything else I do because it's entirely AI-generated. I wrote about that here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Nov/6/async-code-research/#th... This particular case is a very solid use-case for that approach though. There are a ton of important q…
And again you're linking to your site. Maybe try pasting the few relevant sentences instead of constantly pushing your content in almost every comment. That's what people find annoying. Maybe link to other people's stuff more, or just write what you think here on HN. If someone wants to read your blog, they will, they know it exists, and some people even submit your new articles here. There's no need to do what you'r…