Yeah I think the reputation was probably deserved early in Rust’s life, but as time has gone on it has gotten a lot easier to write, especially with the non-lexical lifetimes update 3 years ago.

It’s better than nothing but it really only drags Bash from “your code is definitely horribly broken” to “your code is probably broken”. Nothing like Rust!

Yeah I know, but if you really mean that analogy then the conclusion is that the normal thing for 99% of programmers to do should be to use AI. In the same way that 99% of people do not get around by running.

I don’t agree with that yet - so far I’ve found AI to be a very fast but mediocre programmer. Kind of like giving a beginner access to all the documentation and a time machine. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want. But definitely not most of the time.

Not everyone that runs is an avid runner.

But I do feel like the analogies aren’t that great. Coding in notepad instead of an IDE is dumb because IDEs work and don’t really have any downsides. AI mostly seems to produce slop that barely works without a ton of cajoling.

modern C++ facilities do make a difference to prevalence of bugs.

This is true, but just saying “write modern C++!” doesn’t actually work in practice. First, there are a ton of footguns that even best-practice C++ doesn’t avoid. Using std::shared_ptr? Great, you’re probably going to avoid memory leaks. Null pointer dereference? Not so much. What’s the modern C++ way to avoid integer overflow?

Second, it’s pretty much impossible to completely avoid raw pointers etc. even if you’re trying, and good luck getting your colleagues to actually try. I can’t even get mine to write proper commit messages. You need a machine forcing them to do it properly. Something they can’t opt out of (or at least where opting out isn’t the easy lazy option).

So yeah it’s better to use modern C++ and it is an improvement, but not enough the change the conclusion that you should just use Rust instead.

Impressive transition. It’s definitely better just to start with type annotations. It’s around 3-10x more work to add them later, and you don’t get the productivity benefits of having had them along the way. Same goes for Python.

Damn that’s pretty good! (Outside the US I mean.)

Presumably this would be a bit higher actually since it’s contract work, not full time.

For benchmarking commands you can’t beat hyperfine. But if you are really talking microbenchmarks you have to do that in-program so it’ll depend on what language you’re using.

E.g. for Rust Criterion is the go-to option.

8 GB is a really small amount. Even phones have had that much RAM for several years. The average desktop I built in 2012 had 16 GB of RAM.

Plenty of modern computers only come with a small amount of RAM, because most people only need a small amount, but 8 GB is still a small amount.

That is about their AI service. If you don’t use that then who cares?

To be honest I suspect they wanted to do this before, but the power mods wouldn’t allow it. I definitely remember the staff posting a proposal to allow second chances for closed questions, and it was downvoted to hell by the mods. They presumably got scared because they were getting a lot of free labour from the mods (even if it probably wasn’t exactly the kind they wanted).

Now StackOverflow is dead the mods have no power, so they are free to make changes.

The company is going forward with it because the “active community” killed their site and now they have no choice.

If they had done it before AI became a viable alternative they might still have some users.

I would say it maybe makes sense to do that for team based projects so your TODOs don’t impact other people finding new warnings in their code.

For solo projects I don’t think that makes any sense.

Deno is great. The best way to write web site and static sites IMO. I really hope they survive.

recent addition of opinion based questions, as well as the upcoming removal of close votes

lol they had at least a decade to do this, and they’re finally doing this after they’re well and truly dead. Fuck them.

Not the great rebuttal you think it is… AI isn’t really about writing code that I couldn’t write. Unless you’re a beginner it is absolutely not at that level yet. It’s about saving time.

Which it definitely can do. Especially for one-off tasks. For vibe coding projects my experience has been mixed. AI seems pretty good for getting things going, especially in areas you aren’t familiar with (e.g. I wrote a simple Chrome extension with it; never written a Chrome extension before). But after a certain point they seem to get stuck in a muddle and you basically have to stop using AI, fix all the code it wrote badly and continue yourself.

But overall it can still be significantly faster than being prideful and doing it all by hand.

Yes if you don’t get a real GUI you’ll end up using this poor-man’s imitation a lot.

I found this one recently which is really good:

https://github.com/sourcegit-scm/sourcegit

Much better than most of the standalone Git GUIs, even the commercial ones.

However I don’t actually use it, because I use VSCode and there’s a great extensions called Git Graph that integrates nicely into it. It is abandoned unfortunately but it still works fine so I still use it.

Here’s my rating of all the Git GUIs I’ve tried (that I remember):

• SourceTree: works ok but just so incredibly slow.
• GitKraken, SmartGit, Tower, Sublime Merge: Commercial and I don’t like the UX of any of these.
• Git Extensions: This one is actually really good. Terrible name though. Also kind of Windows-only.
• GitX: This is also really good but unfortunately it’s one of those pieces of software that has forked into dozens of half maintained versions that you’ll need to spend hours in phpBB forums figuring out which one to use (like TomatoUSB). Also Mac only.

I never tried Magit because TUIs are dumb.

Also don’t listen to anyone that says “just use the CLI”. It’s okay once you’ve learnt how git works, but even then you’re still going to want a way to view the commit graph. Learning Git without a GUI is needlessly masochistic. Once you have learnt it you can start mixing it up with the CLI.

He also thought that Rust integrates poorly into project with a deep C++ OOP hierarchy. That is probably still true as well.

Is there any language that can do that? As far as I know there isn’t. You can use SWIG or whatever but it’s just as awful as any Rust/C++ interop. There’s Carbon, but that’s a work in progress.

IMO if you need integration with a deep C++ OOP hierarchy your options are a) give up and just use C++, or b) pain, no matter what language you target.

The connection column indicates the connection used. USB FS stands for the usb full speed protocol, which allows up to 1000Hz polling, a feature commonly advertised by high-end keyboards. USB is the usb low speed protocol, which is the protocol most keyboards use.

USB Low Speed allows 1kHz polling too. I don’t think you gain anything at all from High Speed. Keyboards probably only use it incidentally because the chip they are using happens to support it anyway.