miniblog.

#Emacs tip: you can read the devel mailing lists from the comfort of Emacs, very easily!

Should languages use arbitrary sized integers by default?

Turns out that you should only use alloca() for small amounts of memory, or it costs you a lot of debugging time. Low level coding is fun!

What "Worse is Better vs The Right Thing" is really about https://yosefk.com/blog/what-worse-is-better-vs-the-right-thing-is-really-about.html (the tension between getting it right and shipping)

Regularly surprised by the subtleties of FP maths. TIL there are FP environments and it can even throw exceptions!

AST matchers and Clang refactoring tools https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2014/07/29/ast-matchers-and-clang-refactoring-tools (introduces clang-query and the excellent AST matching API)

There are Only Four Billion Floats–So Test Them All! https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/theres-only-four-billion-floatsso-test-them-all/ (exhaustive testing can prove absence of bugs!)

Current status: writing Rust macros. It's dragged C-style macros most of the way to lisp. There's a learning curve, but it's a boon.

Atom has a thriving ecosystem, but I'm surprised it ships with minimalist git support. Adding and committing a file requires more packages!

Smalltalkers are increasingly exploring git and GitHub: https://gemstonesoup.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/practical-git-for-smalltalk-stic-2012/ (gives a good overview of different Smalltalk VCS options)

Why do Windows functions begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction? https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110921-00/?p=9583 (it's a speedy 2 byte NOP for patching!)

.@rustlang allows number literals to be written as e.g. 1_000_000 to group digits. I wish more languages did this!

Does LLVM keep its API unstable deliberately? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11081286 (it certainly helps with a weak copyleft licence)

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