Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social), page 2

So after a prelude containing reimplementations of if, while, int comparisons, and "noop", I am now ready to implement "fizzbuzz". I do not need an implementation of "fizzbuzz", I'm supposed to be doing AOC2024 day 6. But at least I know my helper routines work!

Fizzbuzz source:

https://github.com/mcclure/aoc2024/blob/6d12e9cf65158b5f511da8545d263f4ed1dcad99/06-01-guard/src/test-fizzbuzz.l0

I was GOING to implement a `proc` that modified function code in-place to add local variable support, but debugging `while` took a lot out of me, so I think I will not do that for this project.

I've realized something:

mov rax, r10
add r8, 1
jmp _main_loop_reset

Assembly looks a lot like LISP once you remove the parentheses! So I wanted to design an ASM syntax that exists as a data structure within a LISP, and write code as a LISP program that generates that data structure. In other words make a DSL similar to "Amaranth" or my old "No Compiler" blog posts https://msm.runhello.com/p/category/plt/no-compiler . I may be just confusing you at this point— I'm not sure I can describe this idea clearly in 500 chars.

Say in documentation I'm trying to express the idea of there being a particular revision/minor revision of a programming language's *specification*— as distinct from the software that runs/compiles the language. What words are an option here?

"Edition"?
"Dialect"?

Can you think of anything else? Punny suggestions invited.

Contrarian opinion: Brunch should be embraced as fundamentally leftist because eggs and pancakes are foods which can be easily prepared in mass quantities. Communist Brunch is logistically attainable. If longhouses returned to the northeast in the modern era they would serve brunch

The #1, most immediate feature I always want out of a chat application is "please scroll back up to the last time I made a comment, so I can read the replies". Bafflingly, no chat app in the world has a dedicated button for this, and each one makes you memorize a semi-standardized syntax that might begin with author:, might begin with from:, might support "me", might require you to type a 12-digit handle, and might not exist.

But it wasn't a ROCK it was a U+1FAA8 ROCK, U+200D ZERO-WIDTH JOINER, U+1F99E LOBSTER

So there's a Bluesky spammer who's been replying to posts with a video of him jacking off and a link to his OF with such frequency lately that he is seriously giving Nicole¹ a run for her money

¹ Or, potentially, the harasser/identity thief who stole Nicole's name and likeness

This is before we get into the issue, which people in language design seem to call out frequently, that the "metal" C is "close to" is in fact a 1970s PDP-11, which the computer you will be running your actual C on differs from in several important ways

The power of Rust is not that it is "close to the metal" but rather that it is close to the compiler backend. Rust doesn't attempt to make you frame your code in a way that the hardware will execute well, but rather to frame it in a way that the LLVM optimizer will optimize well. This is the correct decision since your C code after all will be processed through that same optimizer before it touches anything resembling metal

"Safe sex" but in the Rust sense https://glaceon.social/@CyclopsCaveman/114282191577060734

He has rampaged over America as much and as long as he has because nobody wanted to accept the costs of stopping him. Nobody *wants* conflict. Every individual person who could have done something, looked at how doing something would interfere with their other plans, and chose themself. Decided to take the easy path, pull out an umbrella and not try to stop the rain. So it got worse. He saw it was working, and did more. And more.

The question is whether the world will react the way America did.

@jackpearse Well, that's interesting because that's something that would have happened even if Harris were President right now.

Wonder if which countries have good or bad responses to the Trump tariffs will be partially determined by whether the country's time zone happened to have their leaders awake or asleep during the block of time between Trump announcing the tarriffs and the markets opening in the US the following morning

(I am choosing not to use a CW on this post because this is very anodyne. If you reply with in-depth analysis, I suggest a pol CW.)

So I added some debug prints to the GC and upon looking at the outputs I *immediately*, intuitively understood what was wrong and how to fix it (you'll be unsurprised to learn it was an off-by-one error… every pointer was being updated to its correct new value minus one).

I made the fix. I reran the test.

It failed in the exact same way.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Okay the garbage collector now "works"! In the sense that it can remove garbage from the system. (The problem before was I have a list of roots which includes any item the VM is currently operating on,, and roots were… never… getting removed… from the root list.)

It still does *not* work, in the sense that after the collection every pointer in the system is pointing to the wrong object. Oops!

Can't sleep. Distracting thunderstorms. Stomach's angry.

Only one thing to do: Stay up and learn to write a Drop implementation

(I think this is probably pretty simple, it's just one of a few relatively basic Rust things I haven't yet turned out to have a need for)

Yes that's right I'm implementing OBJECT POOLING

Update: I wrote the tests, and it actually doesn't work. But I know why.

I do suspect I am going to write many more than 62 lines of code trying to *test* this.

Today I fixed it and now I have a 62 line GC (7 lines whitespace/comments) which is *slightly* less efficient than it could be due to every object being temporarily copied to a temporary heap object before the new space.

The original design *could* be made to work if I write my own implementation of Vec, which would be easy but annoying. The problem is I need to push to the end of a Vec while a mutable ref is held to one of its members, which *is* Rust invariant-safe, but not borrow-check-legal

Yesterday I wrote a copying garbage collector in 52 lines of code and in about an hour. It was I was *so* happy and satisfied and the code was so clean and elegant. Then I realized the way I had done it was incompatible with the Rust borrow checker and spent another hour or two trying to figure out how to work around it. The Rust Experience.