• 2 posts
  • 14 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 18th, 2023
  • While I don’t agree with your first point from my experience, the second one is very true. Especially for memory consumption, your typical Java app easily occupies five times as much as something more bare metal.

  • Just because it’s not possible on a Turing Machine doesn’t mean it’s impossible on a PC with finite memory. You just have to track all the memory that is available to the algorithm and once you detect a state you’ve seen already, you know it’s not halting ever. The detection algorithm will need an insane amount of memory though.

    Edit: think about the amount of memory that would need. It’s crazy but theoretically possible. In real world use cases only if the algorithm you’re watching has access to a tiny amount of memory.

  • tl;dr Language evolution and future outlook are big factors besides the existing language features themselves.

    I guess Rust has attracted many C++ devs because C++ is painful and there were no other/better options. Rust comes with a build/dependency management system and memory safety guarantees on top of the type safety. Even though C++ templates are still unmatched, I prefer Rust 95% of the time. C++ is evolving very slow and it’s extremely hard to participate. Rust will win that race eventually.

    Python has been around since 1991(!) and it took a looong time to build the community. It was a niche like Nim is now for many years.

    I’ll definitely keep an eye on Nim because it has the potential to become quite popular.

    Again, that’s all just my opinion.

  • I have to disagree with your “when use what” list. Python has production ready web backend frameworks, Rust is perfectly fine for complex and high-level software, and PHP is mostly obsolete. That’s my humble opinion though. I looked into Nim and like many of the concepts. It’s quite complex and I prefer Rust most of the time when Nim would be an option. I’d argue it’s some kind of “jack of all trades”. A bit like python but compiled, ref-counted, and probably a lot faster. It’s lacking the huge community python has though.

  • This is the way! There’s a catch with swap files on encrypted disks and hibernation but that’s quite a special case. Edit: forgot to mention zswap, the compressed version of swap.