miniblog.

Knit, Chisel, Hack: Building Programs in Guile Scheme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVO8WXFYDIA (great overview of the Guile design from @andywingo himself!)
TIL there's a thriving Emacs community in China with its own Discourse instance!
Writing tests in the traditional red-green approach is invaluable. But make sure they're red for the right reason!</just-lost-10-minutes>
.@melpa_emacs looks like badges are broken? E.g. https://stable.melpa.org/packages/loop-badge.svg -- seems to be an issue on @Shields_io (cc @sanityinc)
Whilst there are no plans for a Rust 2.0, there is an interesting list of desirable breaking changes:
Great blog post comparing macros in Racket and Haskell: https://blog.ezyang.com/2016/07/what-template-haskell-gets-wrong-and-racket-gets-right/ (we need more polyglot macro comparisons—cross pollination!)
I'm a huge fan of writing READMEs, and I hold GitHub entirely responsible :). The need for docs varies, but everything needs an overview.
I'm also reading claims that prompts are *much* faster than full continuations!
I'm really interested to see that Guile is moving away from call/cc to prompts. A discussion of motivations: https://wingolog.org/pub/qc-2012-delimited-continuations-slides.pdf [PDF]
Debugging Emacs memory leaks: https://notes.secretsauce.net/notes/2015/09/19_debugging-gnu-emacs-memory-leaks-part-1.html (reproduction, measurement and bisection!)
On the benefits avoiding territorial code ownership:
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Inter-Procedural Optimization and Derefinement https://www.playingwithpointers.com/ipo-and-derefinement.html (excellent post showing how combining optimzns can cause surprises)
The Renewed Case for RISC: Avoiding ISA Bloat with Macro-Op Fusion for RISC-V https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.02318 (enjoyable and quantitative!)
The Renewed Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer: Avoiding ISA Bloat with Macro-Op Fusion for RISC-V
The Renewed Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer: Avoiding ISA Bloat with Macro-Op Fusion for RISC-V
This report makes the case that a well-designed Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) can match, and even exceed, the performance and code density of existing commercial Complex Instruction Set Computers (CISC) while maintaining the simplicity and cost-effectiveness that underpins the original RISC goals. We begin by comparing the dynamic instruction counts and dynamic instruction bytes fetched for the popular proprietary ARMv7, ARMv8, IA-32, and x86-64 Instruction Set Architectures (ISAs) against the free and open RISC-V RV64G and RV64GC ISAs when running the SPEC CINT2006 benchmark suite. RISC-V was designed as a very small ISA to support a wide range of implementations, and has a less mature compiler toolchain. However, we observe that on SPEC CINT2006 RV64G executes on average 16% more instructions than x86-64, 3% more instructions than IA-32, 9% more instructions than ARMv8, but 4% fewer instructions than ARMv7. CISC x86 implementations break up complex instructions into smaller internal RISC-like micro-ops, and the RV64G instruction count is within 2% of the x86-64 retired micro-op count. RV64GC, the compressed variant of RV64G, is the densest ISA studied, fetching 8% fewer dynamic instruction bytes than x86-64. We observed that much of the increased RISC-V instruction count is due to a small set of common multi-instruction idioms. Exploiting this fact, the RV64G and RV64GC effective instruction count can be reduced by 5.4% on average by leveraging macro-op fusion. Combining the compressed RISC-V ISA extension with macro-op fusion provides both the densest ISA and the fewest dynamic operations retired per program, reducing the motivation to add more instructions to the ISA. This approach retains a single simple ISA suitable for both low-end and high-end implementations, where high-end implementations can boost performance through microarchitectural techniques.
I've had a personal disk start giving random fsck errors. Periodic reminder to back up your data!
TIL Fortran has a keyword PURE that allows you specify if code has side-effects: https://stackoverflow.com/a/30315370/509706 (effect-based languages are rare!)
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