Hacker News: Rochus

New comment by Rochus in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

Rochus — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 15:59:20 +0000

Cool. So at least the work-hours haven't changed much since ;-)

New comment by Rochus in "Show HN: ShevtoneAudio Orchestrator – Turning MIDI into Full Orchestration"

Rochus — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 12:07:24 +0000

Looks interesting. But I couldn't find any practical examples or tutorials so far. Any hints? Is there a description somewhere how it is implemented, i.e. what technical concepts are used to analyze the Midi, understand the music well enough, and then invent a credible orchestration?

New comment by Rochus in "Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why"

Rochus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 15:35:15 +0000

> Rust is an enormously more complex language

I have no doubt that a Rust compiler can be implemented in C. But it's a different project to write one in C from start than trying to migrate an existing C++14 based project to C. The former is likely "easier". An alternative approach could be to migrate the C++14 code back to C++98 and get rid of the exceptions, which makes it transpilable to C (using the cfront approach). Though the result might not be maintainable C, but still C.

EDIT: if you manage to migrate it back to a sufficiently moderate C++11 subset, or even C++98, you could use GCC 4.7.4 to compile it, which itself is written in C.

New comment by Rochus in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

Rochus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:58:40 +0000

That's fascinating. I spent significant time with early MUMPS and the machines of the time (https://github.com/rochus-keller/mumps/) which had a comparable amount of memory.

Was your whole insurance application only assembler, i.e. no COBOL or RPG at all?

New comment by Rochus in "Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why"

Rochus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:51:13 +0000

Sounds pretty difficult (if not impossible, see cfront 4.0) to translate C++ code to C89. You have to keep track of all constructors and destructors and their progress along the body yourself, and I assume it must be fit for exceptions as well?

New comment by Rochus in "Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why"

Rochus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 14:26:40 +0000

Well, it might not be your actual problem. But there are always people who look a little further beyond the horizon.

New comment by Rochus in "Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why"

Rochus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:06:13 +0000

This project is not pointless at all. It's not about "reproducible builds", but about building a full present system from "first principles". It would be a way out of a significant dependability problem barely anyone today is aware of.

New comment by Rochus in "Bootstrappable Builds: How and Why"

Rochus — Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:02:21 +0000

> If anyone has ideas/cheaper ways to run it I would like to know

GCC 4.7.4 was the last version of GCC fully written in C, with full C++98/03 support and a decent subset of C++11. As far as I know it is used by the bootstrap project presented in the article.

New comment by Rochus in "Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo"

Rochus — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 21:24:00 +0000

Thanks for these interesting insights. It's hard to imagine today how scarce computers actually were at that time. The assembler was for the System/360?

New comment by Rochus in "DHH: Future of Programming – Lex Fridman Podcast #501 [YouTube, 5 Hours]"

Rochus — Thu, 27 Aug 2026 12:26:04 +0000

This is a very interesting talk. I'm amazed to hear how good this AI stuff already is (if I take DHH's statements at face value).

New comment by Rochus in "ISO/IEC DIS 26791-1 – The RISC-V instruction set manual"

Rochus — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:56:36 +0000

Well, since everyone already has the specs, they should release it as a free standard.

New comment by Rochus in "MIDI Survivor: play music to defeat monsters"

Rochus — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:40:25 +0000

"Buy now - 10$"

New comment by Rochus in "Show HN: A Modern GUI Library for Ada: CSS Styling, XML UI, SDL3"

Rochus — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 21:38:33 +0000

Cool project. Good idea to use SDL3; it brings along much more than SDL2 where you had to use a lot of other libraries to become platform independent with all features. The disadvantage might be that SDL3 itself (as SLD2) is pretty big. Ada got a bit out of fashion (unfortunately) but it's still an impressive, excellent language. Still an interesting choice. Maybe you can give more information about your choice and plans with the GUI library.

New comment by Rochus in "The Two Factions of C++ (2024)"

Rochus — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 02:29:38 +0000

Have a look at boost::movelib::unique_ptr which works well with C++98/03.

New comment by Rochus in "Swiss tourist sentenced to year in jail for insulting Bali sacred Day of Silence"

Rochus — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 15:09:05 +0000

I guess people will avoid this country/island alltogether when these such sentences get commonly known. Maybe that was the intention, i.e. to reduce overcrowding due to tourism?

New comment by Rochus in "Pitfalls of Benchmarking on Modern Systems"

Rochus — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:52:18 +0000

Interesting. Since I have the T480 I have to switch off variable speed when doing benchmarks and switch off all but one core.

New comment by Rochus in "The Two Factions of C++ (2024)"

Rochus — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 10:57:27 +0000

Have a look at Qt implicit sharing. There is/was also a Boost library which could do most of it long before c++11.

New comment by Rochus in "The Two Factions of C++ (2024)"

Rochus — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:35:24 +0000

For all of my projects it is good enough. C++11 onwards has a few advantages, but I don't need them. Moving ownership between containers to avoid allocations was possible with the standard library even before C++11, and Qt offered "implicit sharing" which has a similar effect without syntax changes and incompatibilities. Even with my C++11 projects (e.g. https://github.com/rochus-keller/eigen/) I had to take care still in 2024 which feature not to use on MSVC because it didn't work or behaved differently. I never have any ownership issues and I implement large compiler projects with different AST and IR layers. All my projects still compile with https://github.com/rochus-keller/leanqt/ on all platforms. I would never trade a tiny language advantage with a whole world of dependability issues. One day I will revive and refactor GCC 4.7 to get a cross-platform C++98 with parts of 11 compiler just written in C, then latest all of my software is buildable "from first principles".

PS: it's funny I wrote my comment three days (and not an hour) ago.

New comment by Rochus in "The Two Factions of C++ (2024)"

Rochus — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:58:02 +0000

Very interesting summary of facts and quotations with conclusions. I would say there are even more camps than the two mentioned. Personally I think C++98 and Qt5 just worked and were good enough for all purposes, and C++ since has become an ever moving target with a lot of incompatibilities between compilers. Chasing for the ever latest version of the language and compilers is very expensive and enervating. I prefer how they solved this e.g. in the Ada community; they take their time for the release a new standard version, and until then, most compiler vendors have already updated their products and there was relevant experience with the new features long before the new standard was passed. In computer science, it seems to be a law of nature to keep "improving" good things until they become unusable and people walk away. In C++ I did so; I have a few C++11 code bases (some back ported from newer versions), but most are C++98/03; I even made a fork of Qt5 (LeanQt) with my own build system (BUSY) which is less work to maintain than continuously chasing new compiler/tool incompatibilities among platforms.

New comment by Rochus in "CARA – a readiness assessment for Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption"

Rochus — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:17:50 +0000

Welcome to the "CARA club" (http://www.cara.nmr.ch/doku.php/Home). Obviously a good acronym ;-)