• 1 Post
  • 104 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle









  • I am currently writing a C compiler, with my own backend (and hopefully, frontend) in OCaml.

    But why write your own C frontend? It’s much more of a pain than people imagine. I maintain a C frontend implemented in OCaml (the project itself goes back 25 years) and it’s still not on par with GCC or Clang.

    For any other language, sure, but C has so many “wonderful” features, starting with the lexer hack. Your grammar conveniently overlooks this issue but it’s something you’ll have to deal with to actually implement it. So it simply won’t be as nice as theory suggests.



  • These include semgrep, ast-grep, LLMs, and one-off scripts. After running these tools on a large code-base, you usually end up with lots of additional unintended changes. These range from formatting/whitespace to unrequested modifications by LLMs.

    Maybe LLMs do, but why would semgrep or your one-off script be making unrelated changes? This is like using sed to replace something and using grep to filter out the very things you just specifically modified. It should be unnecessary if you commit frequently enough and don’t do 10 different refactorings before starting to commit each one.


  • Isn’t that just drafts for that comment’s reply?

    Because I just saved a comment draft, went looking at something else and wanted to go back. The problem was that I couldn’t find the right post/comment where I saved the draft.

    I thought Boost saved that because going to reply to the same comment would automatically bring up the draft.




  • Sometime HSP just stopped working so now I have to do calls with my laptop built-in mic.

    Also, some programs like Zoom just fail to use the right output device no matter what I choose in settings. I just have to make headphones the fallback device for anything to work.

    But the most annoying thing is Linux somehow stealing the playback when my headphones are connected to multiple devices. Even when nothing plays on the computer but does play on the phone, there’s no audio. I have to disable/disconnect my computer to use headphones with phone when my computer is in range.






  • I might be the minority who was affected by this but how they handled the physical goodies last year was the last straw for me. Unlike all the spammy contributions that rush to it, I didn’t rush creating some pointless PRs on the first day or whatever. My last PR finished its embargo period a few days before the end of October. They even sent out a congratulations email, but when I clicked the link and went to the website there wasn’t anything there. Only when I checked their discord, I saw others with the same confusion and someone semi-officially saying they might’ve run out. It’s obvious they didn’t even ever consider running out and had no system in place to handle that.

    Other than that, some of the rules they introduced in recent years were also so detrimental to meaningful PRs even though they thought it’d motivate that, instead of spammy PRs. Clearly that didn’t work at all and actually had the opposite effect in some cases. It was a lot easier to get spammy PRs counted than meaningful ones.

    I could rant in more detail about the latter if you’re interested, but I’ll refrain right now.