miniblog.

It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time. https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded performance! https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/73vs3766/AMD-Athlon-64-4000+-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U Maybe *relative* performance of languages matters more?

I'm intrigued to see that Google has quantified that new code is generally buggier and less secure than code that has existed in your codebase for longer: https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html

It's odd how lazy evaluation is generally seen as a niche design choice, yet the vast majority of languages treat `foo() || bar()` as short-circuiting.