I don’t think he did get it running. It’s one of my main blockers as well. Last time I tried I got as far as it starting up and logging in to their identity server via the browser, but the redirect back to the application didn’t work. Such a silly thing that prevents it from working. Why does a CAD program need to online auth, anyway? (I know the reason but it’s an annoying one)
> Rust makes it possible to safely manage memory without using a garbage collector, probably one of the biggest pain points of using low-level languages like C and C++. It boils down to the fact that many of the common memory issues that we can experience, things like dangling pointers, double freeing memory, and data races, all stem from the same thing: uncontrolled sharing of mutable state.
Minor nit: this should be mutable state and lifetimes. I worked with Rust for two years before recently working with Zig, and I have to say opt-in explicit lifetimes without XOR mutability requirements would be a nice combo.
In 2008 the US government ended up making more money then they spent though (at least with the tarp), because they invested a ton of money after everything collapsed, and thus was extremely cheap. Once the markets recovered, they made a hefty sum selling all the derivatives they got at the lowest point. Seems like the epitome of buy when low and sell when high tbh.
What, that's super cool! I've also been working on a from scratch implementation of TCL for firstclass multithreading, and it's been really fun learning all the edgecases that show up. I've gotten a lot of the core components working, but man is reference counting a pain in the neck or what. Are you doing a mostly one-to-one port, or something more novel? I've been working on my design to dramatically lower double indirections for lists. It's a little sad that a list contains a list of pointers pointing to another list. So much indirection! So I'm trying an experiment where all non-list/non-dict objects are contained directly after the head dict object in memory. It took a crash course in buddy allocators to finally figure out how to store objects, but it's really cool how I can allocate 8 contigious objects, set the first to the dict metadata, and all other items are the dict's objects. One cooler thing is if one of the dict's items is still borrowed somehere (ref_count > 1), the dictionary will dissolve into individual allocations, and all non-shared items are freed. Then, the new dict will reference them, as they're now normal objects.
> Are you doing a mostly one-to-one port, or something more novel?
Step 1 is a one-to-one port of all the non-I/O, non-OO stuff. I've got it down to a single skill for Opus 4.5 and now it's just a matter of turning the crank and keeping an eye on it.
Step 2: add more functionality for interactive use for humans/agents. Things like defining the syntax of commands, a completion engine, a help system. Essentially all the things you'd expect from a modern shell experience, but with a bring-your-own-UI approach.
> but man is reference counting a pain in the neck or what.
Maybe this is a bit more novel: since the only use case is embedding, and the host language already has dicts, lists, and other data structures, I'm just leveraging those. In the Go version of Feather, dicts are Go maps; in the JavaScript version they are backed by lists of pairs (to preserve insertion order)
That's a slick way, would you essentially have a second counter that you'd set to the current cursor whenever you use `.currentToken()` or something like that?
Huh, that's a really interesting approach. I just wrote my first Pratt parser a month ago, and one of the most annoying things was debugging infinite loops in various places (I had both tokenizer bugs where no characters were consumed and parser bugs where a token was emitted but not advanced). It's doubly annoying in Zig, because the default test runner won't print out stdout at all, and won't print stderr unless the program terminates by itself (Ctrl + C doesn't print). I resorted to building the test and running it manually, or jumping into a debugger to figure out recursion issues. It's working now, but if (really when) I run into issues in the future I'll definitely add some helper functions to check emitting invariants.
And it's funny to think about how many different incompatible text standards there were for the first 30ish years of computers. Each vendor had their own encoding, and it took until UTF-8 to even agree on text (let alone the legacy of UTF-16). If it took that long to agree on text, I have a bad feeling it'll take even longer to agree on anything else.
I suppose open standards have slowly been winning with opus and AV1, but there's still so many forms of interactions that have proprietary or custom interfaces. It seems like anything that has a stable standard has to be at least 20 years old, lol.
This reminds me that I just learned the other day that .a files are unix archives, which have a textual representation (and if all the bundled files are textual, there's no binary information in the bundle). I thought .a was just for static libraries for the longest time, and had no idea that it was actually an old archive format.
It may amuse you to learn that tar headers are designed as straight up text tables with fixed-width columns, marred only by the fact that modern implementations pad with 0s instead of spaces. The numbers are encoded as octal digits!
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