Links for October 2023
Mon Nov 13 2023E.W.Ayers
Sorry I forgot to publish this.
Atomic Weapons. I can't believe how crazy everything is between programming language and silicon. So much both the compiler and the hardware will change about your code.
Martin Wickham -- Attack of the Killer Features (video), Zig has an 'optimisation' where it will replace ostensibly pass-by-value function calls with pass-by-reference. But bizarrely doesn't check whether you mutate the values, possibly causing mad aliasing errors. There is a tracking issue but it doesn't seem to strike at the root of the issue that this is just bad. I guess they need to avoid re-inventing Rust ownership. My naive solution is you infer whether the param is mutated in the function, and only do the optimisation if it is read-only.
Kelley -- Modelling Data Concurrency about colourless async/await.
Understanding MobX explains how MobX works.
Command-Query responsibility separation. Is about 'domain driven design'. Usually I'm not a fan of architecture docs but I liked this one. The main point is that you should have separate services or objects for reading and writing to your db. The reading portion should just be a load of indexes.
I read Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. I really wanted to like it but all the characters are pointlessly nasty to each other.