galdor

galdor, 1 day ago

@louis Most of it from LLVM right?

galdor, 1 day ago

@louis LLVM is the perfect example of what happens when you ignore the law of diminishing returns. Yes, it is one of the best compiler/optimizer on the market. Yes it does crazy things. But I would be much happier with a compiler 80% as fast but 10x smaller and simpler.

galdor, 8 days ago

@louis I have not heard of anyone referring to SUS in any context for more than 10 years. POSIX 2018 (i.e. POSIX.1-2017, do not ask) is currently the theoretical reference to be portable on Unix-like systems.

Of course no one bothers getting POSIX certified nowadays, so as usual test and add workarounds as needed.

galdor, 14 days ago

@holgerschurig And yet I use C libraries just fine in Common Lisp, a language which does not use pointers as a language mechanism. No intermediate C. A pointer is just an address, as long as your language has integers and the necessary primitives to call C code, you can use C libraries directly. Ruby FFI does the same thing.

galdor, 14 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

@holgerschurig You do realize that pointers are memory addresses, which are simply integers no matter what the language is, right?

galdor, 13 days ago

@holgerschurig

Modern Common Lisp implementations also have typed foreign types, this is not the wild west ;) Pointers are not "emulated", I honestly have no idea what you imagine. There are a lot of issues with Common Lisp, and I'm the first one to complain about them, but working with C libraries has always been very comfortable compared to what it is in Ruby, Erlang, or even Go (well, CGo).

I do not frown on pointers in general (I wrote way too much C professionally for that), but they do not make sense in Go: there is a GC and pointer arithmetic is not available! There is nothing useful you can do with them, and they cause so many headaches.

galdor, 20 days ago

@louis Everyone knew what would happen after Stack Exchange was sold to a private equity conglomerate. Founders made their money (good for them!) and are out. At the end of day it is yet another company exploiting users for data. Nothing new and no real future.

galdor, 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

@louis

> Can't quite get it why anyone would still volunteer their time as a moderator to this company, err, "community".

It's funny because reading the beginning of your message, this is what I immediately thought. Same thing with Reddit moderators. Companies have been doing a very good job at convincing people that they were providing free services out of the goodness of their heart. Hopefully users will learn from this.

galdor, 22 days ago

@louis I hope it means green threads (let me dream).

galdor, 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago)

@louis From a quick check in CCL documentation, it used to have cooperative userland multithreading and switched to OS threads in 0.14.

The thing is, naïve cooperative multithreading (i.e. Stackless Python or what some Scheme implementations do with continuations) is pretty much useless without a runtime able to deal with IO (global IO handler with epoll/kqueue, yield on all IO ops and resume on IO events), which is tricky because none of this is defined in the Common Lisp standard.

Also this is 2024, if your green threads cannot be dispatched on multiple cores (as in Go or Erlang), the benefits are more than limited.

Doing all of this really efficiently is a very hard problem, especially if you are a native compiler (now you have potentially millions of green threads, each with a tiny stack, then suddenly you make FFI calls and the C code is convinced you have your 4+MiB of stack…).

galdor, 25 days ago

@amoroso What would you like to see in a new Common Lisp book?