[Discuss] seeking places for good discussion about GNU/Linux programming topics

[Daniel M Gessel]

On 2022-10-30 12:29, Bill Ricker wrote:
> If it might be interesting later,  it could be meta-interesting now.
> If you want to bounce ideas off someone on a private channel ...
Oh thanks! I might take you up on that! I've got your email from the 
list and your Mastodon address, so you may get a ping; you've got a 
handle on quite a few corners that are dark to me.

> As with all (anti)Social Media, the key is curating one's feeds.
That's a good perspective.

> Some of my favorite commentators reefer to him only as "that apartheid 
> emerald miner's brat" or some such, which delights me.
That just delighted my wife as well! She hadn't heard that one and 
thinks it's on the money.

> Re compiling to C as IL:
>  much of the world today compiles a VM in portable C99 or Rust and 
> compiles the higher app language to VM bytecodes.
> (Possibly leveraging a standard VM & bytecode, e.g JVM.)
I haven't made any irreversible decisions. I've had some exposure to the 
inner workings of LLVM, but I'm not a true believer (unlike the folks I 
used to work with - LLVM is their one true way). I plan to explore a 
tight integration between higher and lower level abstractions - I may 
crash and burn but hopefully, until the flames get me, it'll be a fun ride.

> (Me, were I developing a new 4GL or whatever, I might compile it to 
> Forth, as Forth directly executes, as opposed to interprets.)
Wikipedia filled in my gap - threaded execution is an interesting 
option, but my experience is that the optimization opportunities 
generated by inlining can be huge. But it's certainly worth keeping on 
the table. Background optimization on these core-rich CPUs is also enticing.

> Were I starting a new project today, I'd  look at Rust for things that 
> need to be close to the hardware (but with better memory safety than 
> any C), and Dart/Flutter for portable applications that could run on a 
> mobile device or desktop. Golang is the other recent star,  favored by 
> some.
> But so much depends upon the domain one is targeting.
I've looked a teeny bit at Rust but, perhaps a catch-22, don't 
understand enough to get what problems it solves. I should probably dig 
deeper, since consensus seems strong.

Thanks again. I'll spend some more time trying to grok Mastodon and Rust.

Dan