43 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2025
  2. Feb 2025
  3. Oct 2024
  4. Nov 2023
    1. A more efficient but more complicated way to simulate perfect guessing is to guess both options simultaneously

      NB: Russ talking here about flattening the NFA into a DFA that has enough synthesized states to represent e.g. in either state A or state B. He's not talking about CPU-level concurrency. But what if he were?

  5. Aug 2023
  6. Jul 2023
    1. only a small fraction of the features of each component, and your program con-sumes 10 or 100 times the hardware resources of a fully custom program, butyou write 10% or 1% of the code you would have written 30 years ago.

      You use only a small fraction of the features of each component, and your program consumes 10 or 100 times the hardware resources of a fully custom program, but you write 10% or 1% of the code you would have written 30 years ago.

  7. Dec 2022
  8. Nov 2022
    1. Rust lets us explicitly state our desires to the compiler

      This is the key. It follows that the same results, then, could be seen if we devised a way to communicate the same desires to the machine when we're dealing with JS. (My preferred thought experiment: imagine a docs/ directory in the repo where these sorts of things are documented for the benefit of other programmers—alongside any other rationale that you would naturally hope to communicate as well—and that the computer itself were made to be able to read and act upon the very same documentation to guide its behavior.) See http://cr.yp.to/qhasm/literature.html

  9. Aug 2022
    1. The lack of CPU power in those days also meant there was deep skepticism about the performance of interpreters in general, and in the user interface in particular. Mention "interpreted language" and what sprung to mind was BASIC or UCSD Pascal, neither regarded as fast.

      still widely held today

    1. The more I think about it, the less I think there is a meaningful definition of the one true run time. I have put significant effort into making sure that runtimes are consistent but, however we do this, it makes our experiments less realistic. With rare exceptions (perhaps some safety critical systems) our algorithms will not be used in highly controlled situations, moderated to reduce variability between runs or to maximise speed of this particular process. Algorithms will be run as part of a larger system, in a computer sometimes with many other processes and sometimes with few and, because of the way that computing has developed, sometimes in raw silicon and sometimes in virtual machines. So the more I think about it, the more I think that what matters is the distribution of run times. For this, your experiment on your hardware is important, but so are future recomputations on a wide variety of VMs running on a variety of different hardware.

      The truth of this has consequences not just for the metaissue of recomputation, but the entire raison d'etre of doing performance studies to begin with.

  10. Jul 2022
    1. Another key idea here is to separate meaning from tactics. E.g. the meaning of sorting is much simpler and more compact than the dozens of most useful sorting algorithms, each one of which uses different strategies and tactics to achieve the same goal. If the “meanings” of a program could be given in a way that the system could run them as programs, then a very large part of the difficulties of program design would be solved in a very compact fashion. The resulting “meaning code” would constitute a debuggable, runnable specification that allows practical testing. If we can then annotate the meanings with optimizations and keep them separate, then we have also created a much more controllable practical system.

      See also http://cr.yp.to/qhasm/literature.html

  11. Apr 2022
    1. The amount of resistance and prejudices which the farsighted originators of FORTRAN had to overcome to !gMn acceptance of their product is a memorable indication of the degree to which programmers were pre- occupied with efficiency, and to which trick- ology had already become an addiction
  12. Mar 2022
    1. I just dislike how non-native it feels and looks.

      I suspect VS Code's non-native look has actually contributed to the uptake from a subset of its users. A fullscreen terminal-based editor like Vim is also non-native as far as widget sets are concerned, but pleasantly so in at least one respect. When Chrome was released, when you asked people what they liked about it, sure they'd say it was fast and whatnot, but for a non-trivial segment of the world, they just liked how visually slim it was. They appreciated how little chrome was actually in Chrome. VS Code managed to reap dividends on its imports of the same approach to its "shell", even while not being particularly fast. (People point to VS Code as an example of a snappy Electron app, and they're not wrong insofar as the comparison goes to other typical Electron apps; on an absolute, non-weight-class-adjusted scale, though, VS Code is still pretty clunky—people just ignore it because of how slim it appears in comparison to IDEs like MonoDevelop[1].)

      1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Monodevelop-main-window.png
  13. Aug 2021
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  27. Jun 2019
    1. This is especially true for online gaming

      WASM is being used to run many demanding applications directly in the browser. Autocad is one important example where architects can use this application without installing a usually very heavy piece of software on their computers. They can access the Autocad suite from almost any computer only by logging into to a website. It is expected that a large part of the gaming industry will shift this way as well as many other services. One of the main advantages of this approach aside from a lack of a local installation is real-time software updates for any number of users. A new model of software building and execution will be based on WASM. WASM is also very good for blockchains. Search for the WASM section to learn more.