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I think the weekly rants just exist because @dfox & @trogus got banned from stackoverflow and they still have questions.
When it comes to learning cutting edge tech... Go build already!
I found Rust intimidating.
I read the first few pages of the official book, got bored, gave up.
Few months later, decided to write a "simple" tool for generating pleasing Jetbrains IDE color schemes using Rust. I half-finished it by continuously looking up stuff, then got stuck at some ungoogleable compiler error.
Few months later I needed to build a microservice for work, and against better judgement gave Rust a try in the weekend. Ended up building an unrelated library instead, uploaded my first package to crates.io.
Got some people screaming at me that my Rust code sucked. Screamed back at them. After lots of screaming, I got some helpful PRs.
Eventually ended up building many services for work in Rust after all. With those services performing well under high load and having very few bugs, coworkers got interested. Started hiring Rust engineers, and educating interested PHP/JS devs.
Now I professionally write Rust code almost full-time.
Moral of the story:
Fuck books, use them for reference. Fuck Udemy (etc), unless you just want to 2x through it while pooping.
Learning is something you do by building a project, failing, building something else, falling again, building some more, sharing what you've made, fighting about what you've built with some entitled toxic nerds, abandoning half your projects and starting twelve new ones.
Reading code is better than reading documentation.
Listening to users of your library/product teaches you more than listening to keynote speakers at conferences.
Don't worry about failures, you don't need to deliver a working product for it to be a valuable experience.
Oh, and trying to teach OTHERS is an excellent method to discover gaps in your knowledge.
Just get your fucking hands dirty!12 -
Me talking to a recruiter (even though I am not looking for a job)
Me: If I walk into an interview, and they ask me to reverse a binary tree for a frontend Reac or Vue position or something along those lines, I will end the call and/or walk away from it.
Him: I get similar feelings from other programmers, I don't quite understand why the notion is as common
Me: Because it is fucking useless, it servers no purpose to a dev to know about that when building frontends with react, I link my github profile, for which they can find advanced backend-frontend related projects, compiler and interpreter projects, plus the title I currently have at my workplace and a bunch of other shit, I am not interviewing for a teaching position at an institute, but an actual place of work, for which if they want to know about DS and A they can review my profile which has a repo of DS and A in about 5 different languages including plain C++. I do not need to be offended by such notions since they server no purpose on the frontend, and neither do other devs. If anything it should be a casual conversation during the interview, not a basis for employment.
Recruiter: .........thank you for explaining this to me, I am sure I can bring it up to the agencies doing the reviews and interviews. Are you still interested?
Me: Are they going to give me a coding assignment for a project or a bs question like what I mentioned?
Him: I don't know
Me: then I am not interested12 -
Ok. Yesterday I finished building my compiler I have to say: it was a pretty darn big thing with 7000 Lines of code.
I did it alone and with almost no help.
I wanted to give some advice in case someone wants to program a compiler. I knaw its useless in times of lex and yacc, but anyway.
-have a good idea for the language
-learn about parser/lexer
-learn assembler
-do it like me: output the assembler to a file and let it assemble/link by the linux standart-tools (call the commands)
-Have fun. Fun is essential in coding
I hope I was able to help people who want to build a compiler alone... Yau can always ask questions ;~)
-3 -
I'm working on a programming language with a "bytecode" interpreter and a compiler that translates source code to said bytecode and... it sort of actually works!
I want to recreate an Erlang-style environment, currently you can write functions, call C++ functions via wrappers, have immutable-only values, and it has no explicit control structure apart from statement sequencing and the if-expression because I want to make it as functional as possible. Next thing on the list is to add a green threads implementation and ability to spawn and send messages to processes.
Still a WIP and heck even design-in-progress.
Now for the rant:
I'm using CMake for building C++ (interpreter) and Stack for Haskell (compiler) and I've been trying to get them to talk to each other for hours because I want CMake to manage the Stack build too and shove all the executables into one place. CMake documentation is weird and Stack isn't too helpful either, so I guess I'll just spend another few hours trying to get Stack to fuckin reveal its build directory to CMake and/or build to a given directory. Ugh.
8 -
[long]
When searching for internship via school I found this small startup with this cute project of building a teaching tool for programming. There were back then 2 programmers: the founder and the co-founder.
Then like 1 week before the internship started, the co-founder had a burnout and had to get off the project, while the company was so low on budget the founder, aka my new b0ss, had to work separate jobs to keep the company alive. (quite metal tbh)
It's funny because I'm a junior developer, 100%. I've been coding as a hobby for around 8 years now but I've never worked in a big company before. (No exception to this workplace either)
First project I get: rewrite the compiler. The Python compiler.
"But wait, why not just embed a real compiler from the first case?"
-nanananana it's never simple, as you probably know from your own projects.
The new compiler, as compared to existing embedded compiler solutions out there, needed these prime features:
- Walk through the code (debugger style), but programmatically.
- Show custom exceptions (ex: "A colon is needed at the end of an if-statement" instead of "Syntax error line 3")
- Have a "Did-you-mean this variable?" error for usage of unassigned variables.
- Be able to be embedded in Unity's WebGL build target
All for the use case of being a friendly compiler.
The last dash in the list is actually the biggest bottleneck which excluded all existing open-source projects (i could find). Compliant with WebAssembly I can't use threads among other things, IL2CPP has lots of restrictions, Unity has some as well...
Oh and it should of course be built using test-driven development.
"Good luck!" - said the founder, first day of work as she then traveled to USA for **3 weeks**, leaving me solo with the to-be-made codebase and humongous list of requirements.
---
I just finished the 6th week of internship, boss has been at "HQ" for 3 weeks now, and I just hit the biggest milestone yet for this project.
Yes I've been succeeding! This project has gone so well, and I'm surprising myself how much code I've been pumping out during these weeks.
I'm up now at almost 40'000 lines of source and 30'000 lines of code. ‼
( Biggest project I've ever worked on previously was at 8'000 lines of code )
The milestone (that I finished today) was for loops! As been trying to showcase in the GIF.
---
It's such a giant project and I can honestly say I've done some good work here. Self-five. Over-performing is a thing.
The things that makes me shiver though is that most that use this application will never know the intricates of it's insides, and the brain work put into it.
The project is probably over-engineered. A lot. Having a home-made compiler gives us a lot of flexibility for our product as we're trying to make more of a "pedagogic IDE". But no matter that I reinvented the wheel for the 105Gth time, it's still the most fun I've had with a project to date.
---
Also btw if anyone wants to see source code, please give me good reasons as I'm actively trying to convince my boss to make the compiler open-source.
Cheers!
4 -
Here it is: get MythTV up and running.
In one corner, building from source, the granddaddy Debian!
In the other, prebuilt and ready to download, the meek but feisty Xubuntu!
Debian gets an early start, knowing that compiling on a single core VM won't break any records, and sends the compiler to work with a deft make command!
Xubuntu, relying on its user friendly nature, gets up and running quickly and starts the download. This is where the high-bandwidth internet really works in her favor!
Debian is still compiling as Xubuntu zooms past, and is ready to run!
MythTV backend setup leads her down a few dark alleys, such as asking where to put directories and then not making them, but she comes out fine!
Oh no! After choosing a country and language the frontend commit suicide with no error message! A huge blow to Xubuntu as this will take hours to diagnose!
Meanwhile, Debian sits in his corner, quietly chugging away on millions of lines of C++...
Xubuntu looks lost... And Debian is finished compiling! He's ready to install!
Who will win? Stay tuned to find out!4 -
From NAND to Tetris..
This book is IMO the best book for those who want to venture to the lower level programming.
This books retrains you’re thinking, teaches you from the bottom up! Not the typical top down approach.
You begin with the idea of Boolean algebra. And the move on to logic gates.. from there you build in VHDL everything you will use later.
Essentially building your own “virtual machine”.. you design the instruction set. Of which you will then write assembly using the instruction set to control the gate you built in VDHL.
THEN you will continue up the abstraction layer and will learn how a compiler works, and then begin written c code that is then compiled down to your assembly of your instructions set to be linked and ran on your virtual machine you built.
All the compiler and other tools are available on the books website. The book is not a book where you copy and paste, run and done.... you kinda have to take the concepts and apply them with this book.
Then once you master this book, take it the extra step and learn more about compilers and write your own compiler with the dragon book or something.
Fantastic book, great philosophy on teaching software.. ground up rather than top down. Love it! It’s Unique book.
21 -
Making my own game console.
I work with FPGAs and have access to a bunch of pretty nice dev boards, so building a workable CPU and GPU is definitely possible. I even have architectures for both in mind, and have planned ways to get compiler support (i.e. just use RISC-V as the ISA as much as possible so that I can reuse an existing RISC-V compiler with minimal changes) so that I don't need to write assembly.
But, lack of time. Sigh.4 -
So legitimately accidentally started building a compiler... Don't ask how because I don't know...
(No it's not a 'true' compiler that will create executables, it just a compiler to make some data easier for my runtime to read it)2 -
Ok. question:
should I learn Java or not?
I come from a C++ background and would (obviously) like to know, wether I need Java in my career. I already have some pretty neet projects like a selfmade "compiler" , Im currently building a chess engine that doesnt brute force.
An alle deutschen:
Kann jemand mir sagen, wie ich als 9. Klässler einen nachmittagsjob (bestenfalls homeworking) bekommen könnte? Es geht mir nicht um das Geld, sondern um die Erfahrung und die sicherheit, schon einmal etwas VOR dem Abi in der Hand zu haben48 -
finally got TI to cough up their SDK and I noticed there's no compiler or linker or anything. Turns out I need to use TASM.
...TASM is for MS-DOS or compatible. I'm on Linux.
Well, it went poorly, as usual, specifically like this:
- tried to automate building with DOSBox config and Python script: output binary always corrupted. Manually repeated, TASM mangles output on DOSBox every time. No PCem or 86box, and i'm on a Ryzen, so no KVM DOS. Out of luck there.
- TASM Linux build or wrapper? No build, but there is a wrapper! ...wait, it needs... 4 things written by random people to be made from source. I mean, that's not actually that bad... oh, after setting all of them up (and struggling through some autoconf/automake bullshit, one of the programs only had source for a 2.x kernel and autoconf/automake were not happy about it) it fails because one project's been worked on a lot more and dropped support for working with the other 3... goddammit.
- Community SDK? Several options for this... but all of them need .NET 2 to run on Win9x, don't work in Wine, or require... hey look, TASM! GODDAMMIT!
- DOS on a real machine? It's a massive bitch to shuttle files to and from a real DOS machine quickly and I can't take 30 minutes between builds that take me 4 minutes to change enough to need tested again.
why must i suffer like this22 -
Random question that apparently screwed up even Google...
how does an IDE evaluate (and format) code and errors so quickly?
Was thinking maybe building a compiler/programming language would be the best way to learn/practice algorithm... Is it?
19 -
Final project senior year...
Mistake 1: Chose a project suggested by the prof, who did not initially make it obvious that the project beneficiary would be a personal friend of his.
Mistake 2: Nine of us thought this project looked cool and all signed up for it.
Mistake 3: Looked at the code-behind provided for us and discovered that the web-app we were building was... programmed in Java, using StringBuilder to append HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and create its webpages. Which was then decoded and built into a webpage using some obtusely designed compiler.
Mistake 4: Decided to question the reasonability of said project to the prof.
Mistake 5: Did not quit the project as a group and do something else
We all graduated, I think, but a lot of C-'s were had. Fuck that class. -
*Clears throat*
To everyone who say's they won't release X for Y because Y isn't good at Z (For example, people who don't support games on Linux because Linux isn't as good at gaming compared to windows), go fuck yourself with the wide end of a rake...
Fuck me people piss me off with stupidity sometimes .-.
Thing's aren't going to evolve and get better if everyone just abandon's shit at the first fucking hurdle, remember when windows wasn't good at gaming compared to mac, well that fucking changed pretty quick didn't it...
(If anyone is curious how this came about, I'm am still holding hope for Gamemaker studio 2 to come to Linux but in the mean time though about running it's compiler through mono and building a front end to see if I can even do it but was talking to someone about it and they said I'm wasting my time because Linux is shit for games)5 -
Best: building a compiler in C and using LLVM as an IR tool
Worst: my job, and a group project of 5 people which I ended up working on alone1 -
Be me
Newb Ui dev
New job , learn c#
Become xaml pro first
Newb ui dev
Today building menu
It's breaking ree.
Ok I go through an fix
Part fixed
No reee
Commit build for other my senior dev
We have online compiler
Receive build fail
Reeee
My code is good
I'm sweating bullets
I call other dev
Yo I f***** up
Help me
Go figure it out ... reeee
I go spend 40 mins
Don't know what is killing build
Reeee intensifies.
Going to shit diamonds
Reeeeeee
Other dev, lol my bad I turned on somethin that break ur build. Your not fired congrats.
Reeeeeeeeeeeeee3 -
When I was an apprentice in a small company, ...
my boss told me that his company would never ship release builds, because the "evil optimization option" is responsible for breaking his code.
My first thought was that it wouldn't make any sense at all. The default option for code optimization is always set to zero.
After investigating his code, I found out that he didn't care to properly initialize his variables. The default compiler option for debug builds did implicitly initialize all variables to zero. After that I've confronted him with the fact that implicit null initialization does not conform to the standard of C and C++. He didn't believe me what I was saying and he was questioning my knowledge about C and C++. He refused to fix his code to this day, so he keeps building his libraries and applications always in debug mode.
Bonus fact: He would never build 64-bit applications, because his serialization functions do get incompatible with exisiting file formats. -
Developing a compiler is the only thing in programming that is as difficult as building an Operating System.2
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I am a single-pass compiler.
Why?
Well, when I have to do the food shopping for the week, I have a look at the buying list, keep the things in mind, go through the shop exactly once and everytime I see a match with the list, I put it into the shopping trolley.
Efficient and quick.
Soo, on the other hand, my girlfriend is a multi-pass compiler.
What that mean, you ask?
Well, she doesn't have any look at the buying list until she is in the shop. Then, she runs through the whole building until she finally finds the first thing on the list... and repeats with the next one until there's no entry left.
She needs three times longer than me for this, is totally exhausted after it, and, not forgetting, then SHE is angry about ME, because I wanted to have these "special" sweets she had too run through the shop twice for because she couldn't find it at first try.1 -
So I salvaged some computer that was about to be thrown out by IT because it works perfectly fine and would be a waste to lose.
The (current) problem is, there is no built-in wi-fi adapter so I had to order a usb adapter to plug into the machine.
Fortunately enough it supports Linux but cones with a cd with the _source_ of the driver in it and we are supposed to build it. Now what's the problem with that?
First problem: building needs all sorts of build tools, starting from gcc and make. Since it's a fresh install, though, I _cannot_ install those normally because -- you guessed it -- I don't have a WiFi connection, which is why I needed the bloody adapter in the first place, so I spent hours trying to fetch the binaries from the apt register using another computer and bringing them over via USB.
Once that was (more or less) successful, the next problem came around; Second problem: the instructions clearly state to run make, but there is no fucking makefile anywhere so that obviously fails spectacularly. What _is_ there are some bash scripts so I try running those.
Now, just when I think it's finally done (one of the scripts has been running for a while and seems to work) the compiler dies with an error: the fucking driver won't build for the current kernel version. And not just that, but it is clear nobody is using basic things like include guards because gcc kept screaming at me about the same macros being defined over and over due to header file re-inclusion. Like, seriously? Come on!
Long story short the fucking adapter is going back to the seller, let's see if the next one I order more civilized.8 -
Dev chat:
Been a while since I asked one of these questions, decided it's about time to bring them back, so what was everyones latest 'fuck it' moment, whether it was an 'ill do it myself' or a 'fuck this shit' moment...
Currently I am going through a fuck it moment, sick of complaining that GameMaker is not available on Linux, so I'm jumping head in and building an IDE that will hopefully use mono to run the GMS compiler... Despite me having barely any major knowledge in the language I'm using nor the knowledge to easily build a code editor on its own... -
*Building random c++ project to practice for exam*
*Gets stuck on linker error for a while*
*Furiously screams at compiler*
*Realizes that one of the implementation files is missing from the g++ command*
*Internally screams at self*
I'll do great on the exam, huh?10 -
!(rant)
https://github.com/MaximilianJugend...
what diya think about my self-written Compiler? Also my first GITHUB-commit :) -
The time when I started building my first interpreter. I had no idea about them so I just copied the code from the book but it felt good really good and I learned so much about compiler and interpreter design. I guess copying the code and seeing things connect was the best and badass experience for me.
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C++ is the building blocks for many high-level programming languages, and since 1984 its first appearance in the markets the C++ core committee developers have introduced its 4 new versions which are C++03 (ISO/IEC 14882:2003 second edition), C++11 (third edition), C++14 (fourth edition) and C++17 is the fifth edition. With each new version, developers introduced new features, libraries and APIs in it.
C++ introduced as the extension of C programming language which made C++ as a compiled programming language, which means the developer required a C++ compiler to translate the C++ code to its equivalent machine or byte language, so the Operating system of the computer can execute the program.
There are various C++ compilers in the market and most of them are open source and free to use, however conventionally when we say C++ compiler, we basically talk about GCC which stands for GNU Compiler Collection.
What is GCC?
GCC stands for GNU Compiler Collection, and it is a collection of programming compilers which induce C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, and some versions of Java. The first version of GCC introduced in 1987 and it was also known as GNU C compiler which became the standard compiler for C programming language, in that same year GCC also provided Compiler support for the C++ programming language.
Now GCC has various versions and each version give specific support for C++ versions, by now if we look at all the versions of GCC, we have a stable GCC for every version of C++, but there are some exceptions with C++11.
C++11:
C++11 introduced as the 2nd update version of C++, it suffixes 11 because it released in 2011 or because on August 12, 2011, ISO gives official approval to it. Formally C++11 known as C++0X because developers were expecting the new update released in 2010, but with its release in 2011, the core committee developer of C++ changed its name by C++0X to C++11.
C++ 11 replaced the old version of C++03, and it also brings many new features for the C++ developers. The main aim of designing C++11 to stabilize and maintain the backward compatibility of new C++ version with the C+98 and C programming language and that’s become the main reason why core committee developers only introduced new features in the old standard library rather than extending the core language.
GCC does not give Full Support to C++11:
GCC version GCC 4.8.1 purpose the first feature-complete implementation of the C++11 standard, however, the 4.8 and 4.7 does not give the full support for the C++11. The current version of GCC provides the major support for all the standard features of C++11 but if you are using the GCC 4.8 or 4.7 versions then your GCC only provide you with the experimental support for the C++11.
To use the Experimental support of GCC you need to enable it first before you compile or run you C++ 11 version code.
use code std=c++11 or -std=gnu++11 to enable the experimental support for C++11.17 -
I was watching an Ancient Aliens episode called "Beyond Roswell". The show described the idea of some of our tech being seeded slowly by introducing alien technology to specific companies. They suggested that computing technology has advanced very fast and introducing this tech could be part of that.
At first I was kinda pissed about this. I have read about the creation of the first transistor back in the 40s or 50s. WWII really advanced our need for computing devices such as what Turing built. Then I realized a lot of the explosion of computer tech did occur after key ET events. This kind of made me wonder how much is "us" and how much is ET tech. I also realized it can take a lot of effort to understand something really advanced. So reverse engineering can take a LOT of effort to figure these things out. Being seeded by external tech does not take away from humans at all.
A parallel to this is a programmer that learns how to use a C++ compiler. They could go their whole career without ever understanding how the compiler itself is doing its job. I find myself wanting to learn how compilers work and started down this path. I look at the simple grammar I have learned to parse. Then I look at the C++ grammar and think "How can I ever learn to do that?" So I see us viewing potentially advanced things and wondering how the heck can we ever learn to do that. The common reaction when faced with such tech would be disbelief and in some cases ridiculing the messenger. When I was a kid the idea of sending a picture over a phone was laughable. Now this is common and expected. It was literally a scifi concept when I was a kid.
So, back to the alien tech. I am now thinking it would be cool to be working with alien technology through computing. This is like scifi stuff now! So what if what we have was not all invented here (Earth). If anything this will prepare us programmers to get jobs working for alien corporations writing ship level programs and brain interfaces. Think of it as intergalactic resume building. 😉
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