This is about the one thing where SQL is a badly designed language, and you should use a frontend that forces you to write your queries in the order (table, filter, columns) for consistency.

UPDATE table_name WHERE y = $3 SET w = $1, x = $2, z = $4 RETURNING *
FROM table_name SELECT w, x, y, z

Obviously the actual programs are trivial. The question is, how are the tools supposed to be used?

So you say to use deno? Out of all the tutorials I found telling me what tools to use, that wasn’t one of them (I really thought this “typescript” package would be the thing I was supposed to use; I just checked again on a hot cache and it was 1.7 seconds real time, 4.5 seconds cpu time, only 2.9 seconds if I pin everything to a single core). And I swear I just saw this week, people saying “seriously, don’t use deno”. It also doesn’t seem to address the browser use case at all though.

In other languages I know, I know how to write 4 files (the fib library and 3 frontends), and compile and/or execute them separately. I know how to shove all of them into a single blob with multiple entry points selected dynamically. I know how to shove just one frontend with the library into a single executable. I know how to separately compile the library and each frontend, producing 4 separate artifacts, with the library being dynamically replaceable. I even know how to leave them as loose files and execute them directly (barring things like C). I can choose between these things all in a single codebase, since there are no hard-coded project filenames.

I learned these things because I knew I wanted the ability from previous languages I’d learned, and very quickly found how the new language’s tools supported that.

I don’t have that for TS (JS itself seems to be fine, since I have yet to actually need all the polyfill spam). And every time I try to find an answer, I get something that contradicts everything I read before.

That is why I say that TS is a hopelessly immature ecosystem.

I’m not concerned about the Microsoft’s involvement. TypeScript shows an immature tooling ecosystem even on its own merits.

I posted some of my concerns earlier, along with a basic problem challenge (that I can easily do in many other languages) that nobody managed to solve: https://programming.dev/comment/2734178

I’ve only ever seen two parts of git that could arguably be called unintuitive, and they both got fixes:

• git reset seems to do 2 unrelated things for some people. Nowadays git restore exists.
• the inconsistent difference between a..b and a...b commit ranges in various commands. This is admittedly obscure enough that I would have to look up the manual half the time anyway.
• I suppose we could call the fact that man git foo didn’t used to work unintuitive I guess.

The tooling to integrate git submodule into normal tree operations could be improved though. But nowadays there’s git subtree for all the people who want to do it wrong but easily.

The only reason people complain so much about git is that it’s the only VCS that’s actually widely used anymore. All the others have worse problems, but there’s nobody left to complain about them.

The problem with mailing lists is that no mailing list provider ever supports “subscribe to this message tree”.

As a result, either you get constant spam, or you don’t get half the replies.

Unfortunately both of those are used in common English or computer words. The only letter pairs not used are: bq, bx, cf, cj, dx, fq, fx, fz, hx, jb, jc, jf, jg, jq, jv, jx, jz, kq, kz, mx, px, qc, qd, qg, qh, qj, qk, ql, qm, qn, qp, qq, qr, qt, qv, qx, qy, qz, sx, tx, vb, vc, vf, vj, vm, vq, vw, vx, wq, wx, xj, zx.

Personally I have mappings based on <CR>, and press it twice to get a real newline.

The problem with XCB is that it’s designed to be efficient, not easy. If you’re avoiding toolkits for some reason, “so what if I block the world” may be a reasonable tradeoff.

1, Don’t target X11 specifically these days. Yes a lot of people still use it or at least support it in a backward-compatible manner, but Wayland is only increasing.

2, Don’t fear the use of libraries. SDL and GTK, being C-based, should both be feasible from assembly; at most you might want to build a C program that dumps constants (if -dM doesn’t suffice) and struct offsets (if you don’t want to hard-code them).

I don’t remember the last time I used ctrl-C. It’s always select or "+y.

True, but successfully doing dynamically-linked old-disto-test-environment deployments gets rid of the real reason people use static linking.

DNS-over-TCP (which is required by the standard for all replies over 512 bytes) was unsupported prior to MUSL 1.2.4, released in May 2023. Work had begun in 2022 so I guess it wasn’t EWONTFIX at that point.

Here’s a link showing the MUSL author leaning toward still rejecting the standard-mandated feature as recently as 2020: https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2020/04/17/7 (“not to do fallback”)

Complaints that the differences are just about “bug-for-bug compatibility” are highly misguided when it’s useful features, let alone standard-mandated ones (e.g. the whole complex library is still missing!)

I haven’t managed to break into the JS-adjacent ecosystem, but tooling around Typescript is definitely a major part of the problem:

• following a basic tutorial somehow ended up spending multiple seconds just to transpile and run “Hello, World!”.
• there are at least 3 different ways of specifying the files and settings you want to use, and some of them will cause others to be ignored entirely, even though it looks like they should be used.
• embracing duck typing means many common type errors simply cannot be caught. Also that means dynamic type checks are impossible, even though JS itself supports them (admittedly with oddities, e.g. with string vs String).
• there are at least 3 incompatible ways to define and use a “module”, and it’s not clear what’s actually useful or intended to be used, or what the outputs are supposed to be for different environments.

At this point I’m seriously considering writing my own sanelanguage-to-JS transpiler or using some other one (maybe Haxe? but I’m not sure its object model allows full performance tweaking), because I’ve written literally dozens of other languages without this kind of pain.

WASM has its own problems (we shouldn’t be quick to call asm.js obsolete … also, C’s object model is not what people think it is) but that’s another story.

At this point, I’d be happy with some basic code reuse. Have a “generalized fibonacci” module taking 3 inputs, and call it 3 ways: from a web browser on the client side, as a web browser request to server (which is running nodejs), or as a nodejs command-line program. Transpiling one of the callers should not force the others to be transpiled, but if multiple of the callers need to be transpiled at once, it should not typecheck the library internals multiple times. I should also be able to choose whether to produce a “dynamic” library (which can be recompiled later without recompiling the dependencies) or a “static” one (only output a single merged file), and whether to minify.

I’m not sure the TS ecosystem is competent enough to deal with this.

The problem is that the application developer usually thinks they know everything about what they want from their dependencies, but they actually don’t.

The problem is that GLIBC is the only serious attempt at a libc on Linux. The only competitor that is even trying is MUSL, and until early $CURRENTYEAR it still had worldbreaking standard-violating bugs marked WONTFIX. While I can no longer name similar catastrophes, that history gives me little confidence.

There are some lovely technical things in MUSL, but a GLIBC alternative it really is not.

That’s misleading though, since it only cares about one side, and ignores e.g. the much faster development speed that dynamic linking can provide.

Only if the library is completely shitty and breaks between minor versions.

If the library is that bad, it’s a strong sign you should avoid it entirely since it can’t be relied on to do its job.

Some languages don’t even support linking at all. Interpreted languages often dispatch everything by name without any relocations, which is obviously horrible. And some compiled languages only support translating the whole program (or at least, whole binary - looking at you, Rust!) at once. Do note that “static linking” has shades of meaning: it applies to “link multiple objects into a binary”, but often that it excluded from the discussion in favor of just “use a .a instead of a .so”.

Dynamic linking supports much faster development cycle than static linking (which is faster than whole-binary-at-once), at the cost of slightly slower runtime (but the location of that slowness can be controlled, if you actually care, and can easily be kept out of hot paths). It is of particularly high value for security updates, but we all known most developers don’t care about security so I’m talking about annoyance instead. Some realistic numbers here: dynamic linking might be “rebuild in 0.3 seconds” vs static linking “rebuild in 3 seconds” vs no linking “rebuild in 30 seconds”.

Dynamic linking is generally more reliable against long-term system changes. For example, it is impossible to run old statically-linked versions of bash 3.2 anymore on a modern distro (something about an incompatible locale format?), whereas the dynamically linked versions work just fine (assuming the libraries are installed, which is a reasonable assumption). Keep in mind that “just run everything in a container” isn’t a solution because somebody has to maintain the distro inside the container.

Unfortunately, a lot of programmers lack basic competence and therefore have trouble setting up dynamic linking. If you really need frobbing, there’s nothing wrong with RPATH if you’re not setuid or similar (and even if you are, absolute root-owned paths are safe - a reasonable restriction since setuid will require more than just extracting a tarball anyway).

Even if you do use static linking, you should NEVER statically link to libc, and probably not to libstdc++ either. There are just too many things that can go wrong when you given up on the notion of “single source of truth”. If you actually read the man pages for the tools you’re using this is very easy to do, but a lack of such basic abilities is common among proponents of static linking.

Again, keep in mind that “just run everything in a container” isn’t a solution because somebody has to maintain the distro inside the container.

The big question these days should not be “static or dynamic linking” but “dynamic linking with or without semantic interposition?” Apple’s broken “two level namespaces” is closely related but also prevents symbol migration, and is really aimed at people who forgot to use -fvisibility=hidden.

As a practical matter it is likely to break somebody’s unit tests.

If there’s an alternative approach that you want people to use in their unit tests, go ahead and break it. If there isn’t, but you’re only doing such breakage rarely and it’s reasonable for their unit tests to be updated in a way that works with both versions of your library, do it cautiously. Otherwise, only do it if you own the universe and you hate future debuggers.

The thing is - I have probably seen hundreds of projects that use tabs for indentation … and I’ve never seen a single one without tab errors. And that ignoring e.g. the fact that tabs break diffs or who knows how many other things.

Using spaces doesn’t automatically mean a lack of errors but it’s clearly easy enough that it’s commonly achieved. The most common argument against spaces seems to boil down to “my editor inserts hard tabs and I don’t know how to configure it”.

It’s solving (and facing) some very interesting problems at a technical level …

but I can’t get over the dumb decision for how IO is done. It’s $CURRENTYEAR; we have global constructors even if your platform really needs them (hint: it probably doesn’t).