Mark Chu-Carroll on Go (programming language)
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John C wrote:
So basically the same boat as me: the only areas where performance matters are areas where the end users actually notice a slowness.
Not sure what your boat is, but the app I work on stays in the background most of the time and needs to be as unintrusive as possible while synchronizing the content over the network. That means - minimal use of CPU, memory and power (for laptops).
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I work for an animation company in their research team. We write software components for 3d rendering, we have a home grown high performance graphics library, our own multicasting library, etc., I'm currently working on a high performance server (MFC for UI and C++ otherwise), and on a thread pool in C. Most of our code works extensively with other applications (other application API) like Maya, Quicktime, etc., Performance is very important here and C#, Java and other things stay outside the gate.
“Follow your bliss.” – Joseph Campbell
Not to kick a dead horse, but if you're just starting this the VCF might be of help for the UI and other parts, as it has both threaded functions, and thread pooling (as well as run loops, and various other thread stuff in it, all completely independent from the UI junk).
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
I think that you're completely misunderstood
:-D Story of my life I'm afraid. Oh well there's always posthumous understanding I guess. Some day they'll say "remember old man JohnC, man was he ever right about so much stuff". ;)
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
I think they are already saying the first three words, so you're well on your way! :)
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
I think that you're completely misunderstood
:-D Story of my life I'm afraid. Oh well there's always posthumous understanding I guess. Some day they'll say "remember old man JohnC, man was he ever right about so much stuff". ;)
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
John C wrote:
Story of my life I'm afraid. Oh well there's always posthumous understanding I guess. Some day they'll say "remember old man JohnC, man was he ever right about so much stuff"
:) My only issue with your posts is that you tend to generalize your specific situation to "99%" of developers. Otherwise, I fully agree that for most real-world software, watching for every single CPU cycle is a waste of time. In fact, when I was developing some accounting sowtware in late 1990s I proudly used VB6 and everybody was happy with it.
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I think they are already saying the first three words, so you're well on your way! :)
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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John C wrote:
Story of my life I'm afraid. Oh well there's always posthumous understanding I guess. Some day they'll say "remember old man JohnC, man was he ever right about so much stuff"
:) My only issue with your posts is that you tend to generalize your specific situation to "99%" of developers. Otherwise, I fully agree that for most real-world software, watching for every single CPU cycle is a waste of time. In fact, when I was developing some accounting sowtware in late 1990s I proudly used VB6 and everybody was happy with it.
Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
My only issue with your posts is that you tend to generalize your specific situation to "99%" of developers.
Yeah I know, it just gets tedious qualifying everything over and over sometimes like I'm writing a license agreement or something. There seem to be a vocal minority in the lounge that are into unusual areas of work and I try to balance that against what I know to be the vast majority that are grinding out bog standard business apps (which you can see from the questions in the forums) and don't post here but lurk a lot.
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
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Normally I'd ignore this, and bitch to myself, but I'm going to try and take the time to respond to this, so I suppose this will end up being a mini-rant. First this smells suspiciously of unix-like laziness. When I start to hear things like "minimalism" and "simple as possible", my bullshit meter starts to go off. Why? Because this is frequently bandied about in regards to *nix type systems as being a feature. In practice what it means (in my experience) is that the developers of said system (or library) want to do as little work as possible in implementing the system, so they make things simple for themselves, which is convenient for them, but usually makes it a total pain in the ass to use or develop with. X-Winblows is a great example of this. It's a lowest common denominator approach that's a total pain to program under and has held back unix GUI's for *decades* (at this point). Other things like this are unix's approach to data (everything's a file!), security, etc. Writing software is hard. Writing *good* software is harder. Implementing details that help the user and/or developer and ensure a certain clarity in the system is a lot of work. But when done properly you end up with great results and powerful tool. Unfortunately people don't like to hear this. Just looking at one of the first examples:
func fib(n) (val int, pos int) {
if n == 0 {
val = 1;
pos = 0;
} else if n == 1 {
val = 1;
pos = 1;
} else {
v1, _ := fib(n-1);
v2,_ := fib(n-2);
val = v1 + v2;
pos = n;
}
return;
}Huh? I've got "=", "==", *AND* ":="? WTF? First of all "==" is the bane of peoples existence. How many bugs have been caused by the accidental use of this? It's stupid and should be gotten rid of. That leaves us with, apparently (I haven't read the language spec yet, so I'm going on this guys article and one other one I glanced at) two ways to assign values? Grody. Seriously grody. No OO. None whatsoever, despite the "basic object-oriented features" claim. This seems ridiculous. OO is an incredibly useful tool when used correctly. Just because there are a large number of clueless dolts out there who can't be bothered to learn their craft properly and screw things up, doesn't mean you need to drop it from the language. Make it optional. You don't need to force it down peoples throats (like Java does), but you don't need to take it away either. "There's an allocation operator, "new" - but it doesn't initialize values. You can't p
Jim Crafton wrote:
but you don't bother to initialize variables, even stuff like ints, etc to 0?
From the spec: " The zero value When memory is allocated to store a value, either through a declaration or make() or new() call, and no explicit initialization is provided, the memory is given a default initialization. Each element of such a value is set to the zero value for its type: false for booleans, 0 for integers, 0.0 for floats, "" for strings, and nil for pointers, functions, interfaces, slices, channels, and maps. This initialization is done recursively, so for instance each element of an array of structs will have its fields zeroed if no value is specified. "
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Jim Crafton wrote:
but you don't bother to initialize variables, even stuff like ints, etc to 0?
From the spec: " The zero value When memory is allocated to store a value, either through a declaration or make() or new() call, and no explicit initialization is provided, the memory is given a default initialization. Each element of such a value is set to the zero value for its type: false for booleans, 0 for integers, 0.0 for floats, "" for strings, and nil for pointers, functions, interfaces, slices, channels, and maps. This initialization is done recursively, so for instance each element of an array of structs will have its fields zeroed if no value is specified. "
Good. That's a relief to see. What I read in the guys article and the previous one hadn't mentioned that.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I also don't want to forget how to in C
Because sometime you need code that actually, you know, performs well.
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
Unpaid overtime is slavery.
Trollslayer wrote:
Meetings - where minutes are taken and hours are lost.
Shelby Robetson wrote:
PIEBALDconsult wrote: I also don't want to forget how to in C Because sometime you need code that actually, you know, performs well.
FFY.
Shelby Robetson wrote:
PIEBALDconsult wrote: I also don't want to forget how to in C Because sometime you need code that actually, you know, performs well.
FFY (reprise). :-D
If the Lord God Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I would have recommended something simpler. -- Alfonso the Wise, 13th Century King of Castile.
This is going on my arrogant assumptions. You may have a superb reason why I'm completely wrong. -- Iain Clarke
[My articles] -
I like Mark Chu-Carroll's[^] writing style. A very balanced and knowledgable guy, IMHO. Anyway, here's his opinion on Go[^]
Good article, thank you for posting the link. :)
If the Lord God Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I would have recommended something simpler. -- Alfonso the Wise, 13th Century King of Castile.
This is going on my arrogant assumptions. You may have a superb reason why I'm completely wrong. -- Iain Clarke
[My articles] -
Good. That's a relief to see. What I read in the guys article and the previous one hadn't mentioned that.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
Yeah, and I don't understand that
:=operator either; I don't know that it is actually useful. I'm still reading the spec and not understanding much of it (parts are difficult to relate to languages I know). It's not object-oriented, but you can write functions in a way that they become methods which seem similar to Extension Methods. Then duck-typing comes in to provide what OO might have provided. I'm not a fan of duck-typing, but that seems interesting. And no Exceptions, but functions can return tuples. Still, the oddest thing so far is the implicit public :confused: -- what if you don't want to start with a Latin character? -
Yeah, and I don't understand that
:=operator either; I don't know that it is actually useful. I'm still reading the spec and not understanding much of it (parts are difficult to relate to languages I know). It's not object-oriented, but you can write functions in a way that they become methods which seem similar to Extension Methods. Then duck-typing comes in to provide what OO might have provided. I'm not a fan of duck-typing, but that seems interesting. And no Exceptions, but functions can return tuples. Still, the oddest thing so far is the implicit public :confused: -- what if you don't want to start with a Latin character?Yeah, it feels like someone's R&D toy more than anything. The channels and goroutines are admittedly cool, but I can't see how this is something ready to be used other than fooling around with.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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Rajesh R Subramanian wrote:
I think that you're completely misunderstood
:-D Story of my life I'm afraid. Oh well there's always posthumous understanding I guess. Some day they'll say "remember old man JohnC, man was he ever right about so much stuff". ;)
"Creating your own blog is about as easy as creating your own urine, and you're about as likely to find someone else interested in it." -- Lore Sjöberg
Most everyone is right about a lot of stuff. It's the ones that are wrong about a lot of stuff that you gotta watch out for.
Visual Studio is an excellent GUIIDE.
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Yeah, it feels like someone's R&D toy more than anything. The channels and goroutines are admittedly cool, but I can't see how this is something ready to be used other than fooling around with.
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
I finished going through the spec and I think the very strangest part is that (unless I misunderstood) for functions with a variable number of parameters you can't specify the type and you need to use reflection to get the values -- crazy.
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I finished going through the spec and I think the very strangest part is that (unless I misunderstood) for functions with a variable number of parameters you can't specify the type and you need to use reflection to get the values -- crazy.
Do they have reflection? That would be pretty useful if they did, I'd be shocked to find out this was true though!
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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Do they have reflection? That would be pretty useful if they did, I'd be shocked to find out this was true though!
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
Maybe not with a capital-R: " Passing arguments to ... parameters When a function f has a ... parameter, it is always the last formal parameter. Within calls to f, the arguments before the ... are treated normally. After those, an arbitrary number (including zero) of trailing arguments may appear in the call and are bound to the ... parameter. Within f, the ... parameter has static type interface{} (the empty interface). For each call, its dynamic type is a structure whose sequential fields are the trailing arguments of the call. That is, the actual arguments provided for a ... parameter are wrapped into a struct that is passed to the function instead of the actual arguments. Using the reflection interface, f may unpack the elements of the dynamic type to recover the actual arguments. " The spec doesn't go into it further.
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Not to kick a dead horse, but if you're just starting this the VCF might be of help for the UI and other parts, as it has both threaded functions, and thread pooling (as well as run loops, and various other thread stuff in it, all completely independent from the UI junk).
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
Using it in the office is completely out of scope. From all the discussions I've had there, my understanding is that they don't want anything new to come into it for UI. They have valid reasons - as far as their windows UI code is concerned, they have a very large codebase, which is MFC based (some libraries and many components). So, all the new UI should happen with MFC, unless I could prove the need for something different. I've always had a desire to do stuff with VCF (in any of my personal projects), but there's this excuse of not having enough time. But eventually I will do it. :)
“Follow your bliss.” – Joseph Campbell
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John C wrote:
Story of my life I'm afraid. Oh well there's always posthumous understanding I guess. Some day they'll say "remember old man JohnC, man was he ever right about so much stuff"
:) My only issue with your posts is that you tend to generalize your specific situation to "99%" of developers. Otherwise, I fully agree that for most real-world software, watching for every single CPU cycle is a waste of time. In fact, when I was developing some accounting sowtware in late 1990s I proudly used VB6 and everybody was happy with it.
Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
I proudly used VB6 and everybody was happy with it.
I'm tempted to use that as my signature, without providing a link to this post in it. :-\
“Follow your bliss.” – Joseph Campbell
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Using it in the office is completely out of scope. From all the discussions I've had there, my understanding is that they don't want anything new to come into it for UI. They have valid reasons - as far as their windows UI code is concerned, they have a very large codebase, which is MFC based (some libraries and many components). So, all the new UI should happen with MFC, unless I could prove the need for something different. I've always had a desire to do stuff with VCF (in any of my personal projects), but there's this excuse of not having enough time. But eventually I will do it. :)
“Follow your bliss.” – Joseph Campbell
Well I totally understand that. If you ever want some ammunition for using something different just let me know and I can give you some fairly detailed reasons, especially on the Windows platform, as well as some detailed notes on how to partially migrate from MFC to the VCF (unlike Qt, the VCF can be partially integrated into an MFC app so it's not an all or nothing proposition).
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:
I like Mark Chu-Carroll's[^] writing style.
Me too :) I wonder how long it will take for IronGo to appear? ;P
xacc.ide
IronScheme - 1.0 RC 1 - out now!
((λ (x) `(,x ',x)) '(λ (x) `(,x ',x))) The Scheme Programming Language – Fourth EditionOh goody. Just another way of making the machine do what I say instead of what I want :). The difference, as far as I can tell, is that they've restricted the number of things I can tell it to do.
Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that's no reason not to give it.
