I still associate gdb with "issue that will be tricky to debug", but I used it today with Rust. Everything just worked.
I was investigating some stack overflows and all the metadata was correct and readable. I was pleasantly surprised :)
miniblog.
This resonated with me: a quality set of de-duplicated bug reports is valuable, and automatically closed issues can prevent that.
https://blog.benwinding.com/github-stale-bots/
Normally I don't like segfaults: they usually mean something low in the stack is broken and it'll be a pain to debug.
Writing assembly, segfaults are a good thing! They're a well-defined error state, whilst there are a whole range of messy failure states that are worse.
I like the lisp convention of 'defvar' (define a variable), 'defmacro' (define a macro). 'defun' feels a little weird though -- shouldn't it have been 'deffun'?
Why don't browsers use history or Alexa rank to highlight trustworthy sites? Gmail already warns me if I haven't emailed a person/domain before.
This seems like a viable heuristic against phishing sites.
This announcement of VisualAge 1.0 for Java (released 1997) is cute. How could Java be revolutionary without a "new killer op-code or do-loop"?
I particularly like how the free edition limits you to creating 100 classes.
https://www.tug.ca/articles/Volume13/V13N1/V13N1_Jenkins_VisualAge-for-Java.html
strace is an incredibly handy tool when you need it.
$ strace ./hello
execve("./hello", ["./hello"], 0x7ffc64e063b0 /* 52 vars */) = 0
write(0, "\177", 1) = 1
In other news, writing to stdin is a definite sign of a bug.
Functions can have pre/postconditions specifying assumptions and legal ranges for inputs. What's the equivalent for pretrained ML models?
https://gradio.app/blog/missing-contracts
It seems crazy to me that the definitive x86-64 resource is a PDF. It's a good reference, but having a canonical, linkable HTML resource would be really handy.
One thing I've learnt from writing a toy compiler is that this instruction usually means you have a bug:
add %al,(%rax)
This is the instruction encoding of all zeroes. It means you've jumped to the wrong place, or screwed up the size of an operand.
Some scary observations from the cURL maintainer about URL interoperability: https://github.com/bagder/docs/blob/master/URL-interop.md
(apparently browsers will happily convert http:\\ to http:// !)
One striking downside of string interpolation is that accurate syntax highlighting becomes much harder.
It's very easy to add some form of nesting, which breaks the "simple lexer" approach to highlighting.
I'm really impressed that PINE64 hosts its website on a cluster using purely dogfooded hardware!
https://www.pine64.org/2020/06/05/rockpro64-cluster-move-june-5-10/
Why GHC still uses its own native code generator, and long term development prospects with LLVM:
https://andreaspk.github.io/posts/2019-08-25-Opinion%20piece%20on%20GHC%20backends.html
Heapless is a neat Rust library that provides versions of data structures like Vec that don't use the heap. It's a familiar API, but some are necessarily different (e.g. Vec::push returns a result)
https://japaric.github.io/heapless/heapless/index.html
I'm optimistic about the potential of RISC-V and excited to see where it goes.
I wasn't expecting to see a *soldering iron* with a RISC-V processor though!
https://pine64.com/product/pinecil-smart-mini-portable-soldering-iron/
Hosting a Docker registry on IPFS! The global P2P content-addressable filesystem seems like a good fit for Docker images.
https://github.com/miguelmota/ipdr
I rather like how Scheme treats boolean literals (#f and #t) as syntactically distinct from normal variables. The syntax feels tidier than overloading variable names.
(Though I'm still amused that 0x12 is a valid variable name in emacs lisp!)
Results from The International Obfuscated C Code Contest are out, and the winner has a devious program using the Turing-completeness of printf! Yikes.
https://www.ioccc.org/2020/carlini/index.html
Why reinventing the technology stack is incredibly hard, but a fruitful exercise:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24480117
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