News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

writtiewrat

Re:The C++ standard for the F-35 Fighter Jet [video] on Sunday December 07, 2025 @05:31PM (#46185961)
If one limited C++ profiles to have no semantic effect and to not change code generation, only subsetting, they would be way simpler than dialects, right? More limited, yes, but also way simpler.

It would enable preventing a lot of footguns, at the very least, like vector<bool>.

Wait, you're one of those Rust evangelists, right? Have you been paid like fasterthanlime?

Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Sunday December 07, 2025 @05:15PM (#46185778)
Regarding restrictions vs. perfect freedom, I think it's also about trade-offs, implementation quality, etc. Typescript has very easy and well-defined escape hatches. Conversely, Rust's escape hatches are an active research field, not well-defined, considered significantly difficult by prominent Rust figures, the safety is leaky (for instance no_std), etc.

C is also a significantly stricter language in some ways than Perl, due to its static type system, despite that type system being primitive. C, ironically, is in some ways way stricter than Rust, since it has a goal of simplicity in its language, and thus writing compilers for it (despite its ancient syntax) and standardizing it is much easier than for Rust. And those properties are rather good for a systems language. Simplicity in the language does of course not generally necessarily translate to simplicity in the code, the ability to create good abstractions is worth a lot.

Rust has also experimented with editions. And there is the issue of Rust allowing backwards compatibility to be broken regarding type inference AFAI recall, in part leading to the 1.80 time crate debacle.

Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @07:11PM (#46177924)
Just fork Rust if you don't like any politics. Unfortunately, Rust might not be worth forking, for anyone.
Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @07:09PM (#46177908)
As someone who doesn't really know neither Perl nor PHP, PHP is more of a domain-specific EDSL than a mainstream programming language.

One of the few insights in the blog post that aren't stupid, fake, inconsistent and schizophrenic, is the one about PHP's common approach regarding spinning up new processes.

Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @07:06PM (#46177879)
Sorry for this repetition, but how popular was/is monkeypatching in Perl?
Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @07:04PM (#46177861)
How popular was/is monkeypatching in Perl?
Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @07:03PM (#46177847)
The blog post is, quite frankly, dishonest, inconsistent and schizophrenic.
Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @06:58PM (#46177806)
Some of the reasons why I never bothered with Perl was that I had the perception that it, like Ruby, encouraged mutating and modifying classes on the fly, willy-nilly. And the lack of static typing. Python also did not have static typing (it has some optional typing now or something like it), but my perception was that monkeypatching was not abused as much in Python as it might be in Perl and Ruby. Not that I used Python a lot.
Re:Perl's decline was cultural on Saturday December 06, 2025 @06:48PM (#46177707)
Reasoning through analogies?