91–100 of 117 posts
Love this. An example of complete and total dominion over the machine. Great quote here too lol > Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.
> If this makes you grin, you are probably holding the torch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automatic Garbage Collection in a kernel probably won't work: I vaguely remember hearing about someone trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel. The big problem is garbage collection: If I remember correctly, the fact that "any" operation can fail with an out of memory exception was a huge problem. Another problem was that random pauses for garbage collections in the kernel had major stability issues. In short, I hop…
> I vaguely remember hearing about someone trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel. Microsoft did that, it was called Longhorn. That release cycle was long delayed and they abandoned most of its ambitious projects, especially C# in the kernel, and the result was Windows Vista. GC was not the only reason for the failure of that project. Someone could write a book about it. A lot of it was actually more about the orga…
When security and reliability were suddenly key issues for Microsoft (to the extent that they ever were), it was obvious that what the Longhorn team had built was never going to meet that bar so they started over building off the Windows Server codebase instead.
Most of this story I remember from a video on YouTube of that old guy who worked at Microsoft since forever and left around the time of the Longhorn debacle, but a lot of it is corroborated in the Wikipedia article as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Windows_Vista
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Pretty dang common. OS X and macOS (and maybe iOS and iPadOS, though I'm not certain) have been autocorrecting "--" into "—" for over a decade. Windows users have been using Alt codes for them since approximately forever ago: https://superuser.com/q/811318 . Typography nerds, which are likely overrepresented on HN, love both em dash and en dash, and we especially love knowing when to use each. Punctation geeks, too!…
⌥- produces a – as well. That's sometimes easier than typing `--` and hoping for the best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Automatic Garbage Collection in a kernel probably won't work: I vaguely remember hearing about someone trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel. The big problem is garbage collection: If I remember correctly, the fact that "any" operation can fail with an out of memory exception was a huge problem. Another problem was that random pauses for garbage collections in the kernel had major stability issues. In short, I hop…
> I vaguely remember hearing about someone trying to use .Net in the Windows kernel. Microsoft did that, it was called Longhorn. That release cycle was long delayed and they abandoned most of its ambitious projects, especially C# in the kernel, and the result was Windows Vista. GC was not the only reason for the failure of that project. Someone could write a book about it. A lot of it was actually more about the orga…
I need to split some hairs for a bit:
Do you mean what is colloquially referred to as "GC", as in the dotnet / Java / Javascript / golang "mark-and-sweep", fully-automatic style?
Or do you mean other automatic memory management systems, which some people technically define as GC, like automatic reference counting? (IE, they clean up memory immediately, and except for requiring some manual form of breaking cyclic loops, generally are fully automatic?)
Oh hey, we've reached the "Metal" stage! https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Oh hey, we've reached the "Metal" stage! https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/talks/the-birth-and-death...
Interesting to see how many things Gary got wrong.
Granted, yeah, we never (or haven't yet) really transitioned to running "full legacy software" inside the browser, or at least it's not common place. That said, I've seen people compile Wine to wasm, Linux to wasm, and lots of other things to wasm, and run em in a browser. Many of the "fake" demos could be done for real now.
The one aspect that remains thoroughly farcical is an equivalent of Wine for OS X/Cocoa good enough to run a web browser. :-(
[edit] And asm.js kind of died on the vine. Not sure how to feel about that one. Wasm could he described as an evolution of the same idea, but in a lot of ways it's something entirely different.