thecloudlet
thecloudlet on Hacker News
Posted by
thecloudlet on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @02:40AM
from the apenwarr.ca dept.
Pilots do this too: "chair flying," rehearsing procedures in your head before the real flight. It works well for checklists, but chair flying a workout still sounds funny to me.
> The feedback loop hypothesis says that this is backwards. That, in fact, we’re going to find that SaaS is ‘hard’ and system software is ‘easy’.
Just weird enough, my brain feels the same way.
I think the greatest problem is documentation. I work on compilers daily. Sometimes I am forced to read directly in to Ghc’s code to just use as a developer.
Maybe we should use Ai to generate up-to-date docs that are well organized like a book, so that all devs are more easy to conquer the different tools and flows.
For example, in C++, for basic toolchains LSP, formatters, standards of formatting, guidelines for performance, do and don’ts, … are more accessible.
I know it’s partially because of the size of the community. If we find a way to make the beginners, or experienced dev from other languages easier to start writing production code. We can thrive more.
Really like this language. I would love more if we can make developing production code easier.
I fell in love with Intel One Mono for this reason
Author here. The concepts in this article were the key to rearchitecting a module in our production codebase, which ultimately yielded a 10x performance improvement. Hope you find these notes useful!
Posted by
thecloudlet on Saturday March 21, 2026 @11:45AM
from the thecloudlet.github.io dept.
Sure! I have updated my post! Thanks for your reference.
Thanks for the links, Nick!
It's fascinating how LLVM relies so heavily on CRTP.
Waiting for Rust experts.
Doing bitwise operations directly on raw pointers is a fast track to Undefined Behavior in standard C/C++. Emacs gets away with it largely due to its age, its heavy reliance on specific GCC behaviors/extensions, and how its build system configures compiler optimizations.
In modern C++, the technically "correct" and safe way to spell this trick is exactly as you suggested: using uintptr_t (or intptr_t).
Posted by
thecloudlet on Thursday March 12, 2026 @08:41AM
from the thecloudlet.github.io dept.
Thank you for the kind reminder! I have removed the duplicate.
You made a great point. Since the original authors are the same, the fundamentals of the Emacs C core are indeed highly compiler-optimized. I hope I can come up with a way to fully understand and write about that history and relationship. (But to be honest, diving into that level of compiler history is a really hard topic to tackle!)
Thanks for the great inspiration and for taking the time to read!
It’s not easy… I’m working to understand it. Recording the process through the way.
That’s so cool. I did not know that.
Posted by
thecloudlet on Thursday March 05, 2026 @05:23AM
from the thecloudlet.github.io dept.