gatherknwldg

C's corners aren't very dark. It's a small enough language that it's easy to explore them. Things can get ugly when programmers decide to abuse the preprocessor because the language isn't complicated enough for them, but thankfully most C programmers have a distaste for such shenanigans. C++ is down the hall and around the corner, if you want darkness.

"write a memory recycler"

sigh This is by far go's biggest wart IMO, and one that frequently sends me back to a pauseless (hah! at least less pausy:) systems language. I sure do like it in almost every other meaningful regard. But I wish latency wasn't something the designers punted on.

I've gone back and re-read your comments in this post and tried to find something concrete in them. You use strong, imperative language, yet I have no idea what you are recommending.

I'm fond of not having the number of build systems I'm responsible for maintaining grow in step with the number of programming languages I use in a project.

gmsl is a wonderful, well considered library. I had to buy the book after finding it.

Thanks!

"Which one is better depends on the platform you're on"

That works against a portable build. That still matters to some of us.

> not worth the effort

Until it is, of course. Growing up is hard.

Does he have an entry on how to become an insufferable blow-hard?

This story typically doesn't have a very nice ending. Maybe you're just having some fun, and will be able to shrug it off some day. I hope so. But if you find yourself trying to quit, and unable to, try to find some help.

Sometimes it takes a lot of tries, with lots of different kinds of help from lots of different kinds of folks.

That is a comment on the style of C that Bourne used in his shell implementation. He used the pre-processor to e.g. name { BEGIN, } END and do other Algol-isms.

Duff would apparently rather read C that was written in C.

> I always thought that making an ASIC was prohibitively expensive except for the largest companies. How much does it really cost?

Full custom is still quite expensive.

But you can go the route I'm talking about (prototype on an FPGA, then get in on one of the standard runs at a chip fab via MOSIS or CMP or a similar service) for ~10,000 USD for a handful of chips.

The barrier to entry is low, now, and getting lower.

Prototyping your custom instruction sets on FPGAs and then commissioning a run to stamp them to ASICs isn't prohibitively expensive, or hard.

In part, it's lack of imagination that has led us so far down the complicated, twisty path into x86 hell.

Just because your chip can do it doesn't mean it's good at it.

Your cash is a valuable asset to your startup, too, but people don't store that in-house.

Who do you trust more, github or Wall Street?

Is your whole comment just kidding, or are you just kidding about helping the next great generation of programmers?

I'll take a programmer who with a deep understanding of Forth over a programmer who cobbled together a Rails app on Heroko.

Every day of the week.