News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

throwa990323249

Re:Claimed proof of Riemann Hypothesis on Sunday December 06, 2015 @04:23PM (#10686685)
The paper addresses that directly:

"Thus, while our proof of RH might look too short to be true, it really involves at least two rather long papers [6, 8], not to mention [9]."

Re:Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan Answer Questions on Go on Friday November 20, 2015 @09:42AM (#10601337)
Actually that doesn't dereference a nil.

https://play.golang.org/p/cjmflMBhF7

Why not learn the language before criticizing it?

Re:What will be the legacy of Go? on Saturday November 14, 2015 @08:01PM (#10568032)
>The language itself not much. It doesn't offer anything new that Java 1.0 with Quasar doesn't already have.

It offers lots of abstractions Java didn't/doesn't: Lots of concurrency features, Ad hoc interfaces, Closures, Stack resizing, Type switches, Multiple returned values, Slices.

Chicken and egg... But if there was good Python 3 support maybe more companies would contribute.
I too want 3.3+ support but I know some claim that there's very little demand from people actually doing something with PyPy for Python 3 support. I really think it may be a chicken and egg problem: that is, support will generate demand.

In any case the 3.3 branch seemed good when I compiled it last, it'd be nice to see a partial release.

Re:Go GC: Solving the Latency Problem in Go 1.5 on Friday July 10, 2015 @07:10PM (#9867547)
ARC languages are Turing complete, but some algorithms require more than just "peppering weakrefs" and actually require you to essentially build your own GC.
Re:Go GC: Solving the Latency Problem in Go 1.5 on Friday July 10, 2015 @07:08PM (#9867531)
Your "confidence" is wrong.

Consider a graph which can have nodes added, and edges added or removed. Say you want to keep track of the part of the graph that is connected to a node.

You can't know ahead of time which references can be weak. So all must be strong and you will leak memory when a circular part of the graph becomes disconnected.

In general, garbage collection is a difficult problem that solves a lot. You can't trivially do without it. It's not just a tool of laziness.

Re:Go GC: Solving the Latency Problem in Go 1.5 on Wednesday July 08, 2015 @11:53PM (#9856065)
ARC won't work when you cannot determine ahead of time where the cycle can end safely. Pretty sure for an interesting set of algorithms this is a problem.

It's something I find annoying about some ARC/Rust enthusiasts: their belief that because they haven't found need for a GC, that there isn't one.