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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • You can always combine integer operations in smaller chunks to simulate something that’s too big to fit in a register. Python even does this transparently for you, so your integers can be as big as you want.

    The fundamental problem that led to requiring 64-bit was when we needed to start addressing more than 4 GB of RAM. It’s kind of similar to the problem of the Internet, where 4 billion unique IP addresses falls rather short of what we need. IPv6 has a host of improvements, but the massively improved address space is what gets talked about the most since that’s what is desperately needed.

    Going back to RAM though, it’s sort of interesting that at the lowest levels of accessing memory, it is done in chunks that are larger than 8 bits, and that’s been the case for a long time now. CPUs have to provide the illusion that an 8-bit byte is the smallest addressible unit of memory since software would break badly were this not the case, but it’s somewhat amusing to me that we still shouldn’t really need more than 32 bits to address RAM at the lowest levels even with the 16 GB I have in my laptop right now. I’ve worked with 32-bit microcontrollers where the byte size is > 8 bits, and yeah, you can have plenty of addressible memory in there if you wanted.



  • I started in C and switch to C++. It’s easy to think that the latter sort of picked up where the former left off, and that since the advent of C++11, it’s unfathomably further ahead. But C continues to develop and occasionally gets some new feature of its own. One example I can think of is the restrict key word that allows for certain optimizations. Afaik it’s not included in the C++ standard to date, though most compilers support it some non-standard way because of its usefulness. (With Rust, the language design itself obviates the need for such a key word, which is pretty cool.)

    Another feature added to C was the ability to initialize a struct with something like FooBar fb = {.foo=1, .bar=2};. I’ve seen modern C code that gives you something close to key word args like in Python using structs. As of C++20, they sort of added this but with the restriction that the named fields have to come in the same order as they were originally defined in the struct, which is a bit annoying.

    Over all though, C++ is way ahead of C in almost every respect.

    If you want to see something really trippy, though, have a look at all the crazy stuff that’s happened to FORTRAN. Yes, it’s still around and had a major revision in 2018.




  • Falsehoods About Time

    Having a background in astronomy, I knew going into programming that time would be an absolute bitch.

    Most recently, I thought I could code a script that could project when Easter would land every year to mark it on office timesheets. After spending an embarrassing amount of…er…time on it, I gave up and downloaded a table of pre-calculated dates. I suppose at some point, assuming the code survives that long, it will have a Y2K-style moment, but I didn’t trust my own algorithm over the table. I do think it is healthy, if not essential, to not trust your own code.

    Falsehoods About Text

    I’d like to add “Splitting at code-point boundary is safe” to your list. Man, was I ever naive!






  • I live in the path of totality and the local tourism office is projecting anywhere from 70K to half a million visitors. It’s insane! Also, I read Niagara Falls, which is obviously used to seeing a lot of tourists, has nevertheless declared a preemptive state of emergency. And there are advisories to be very careful if you’re driving on highways at the time of totality, as there will inevitably be idiots who stop suddenly to gawk and burn out their eyeballs.

    Mind you, it could all be a bust given the current weather forecast is for Monday to be cloudy across the whole region. I guess it’ll still be cool to see everything go dark for a few minutes though.






  • tunetardis@lemmy.catoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlTrue Story
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    3 months ago

    There is an issue with templated code where the implementation does have to be in the header as well, though that is not the case here. C++20 introduced modules which I guess were meant to sort out this mess, but it has been a rocky road getting them to be supported by compilers.