Hacker News: Rochus

New comment by Rochus in "Temper – A programming language for libraries translated to all the others"

Rochus — Fri, 15 May 2026 13:09:10 +0000

Cool. What is the core benefit compared to e.g. Haxe?

New comment by Rochus in "Mino: Embeddable Clojure-inspired Lisp in portable C99"

Rochus — Wed, 13 May 2026 12:17:15 +0000

That's amazing. Are there measurements of decently large clojure applications both with the interpreter and the original clojure engine on the same machine?

New comment by Rochus in "Show HN: An implementation of Common Lisp in development, reached version 1.6"

Rochus — Tue, 12 May 2026 14:09:37 +0000

Amazing work, thanks.

New comment by Rochus in "Show HN: An implementation of Common Lisp in development, reached version 1.6"

Rochus — Tue, 12 May 2026 12:21:51 +0000

That's cool. I wonder how you manage to keep track of everything with this huge all-in-one main.c. Do you plan to achieve 100%? Is there a list of what is actually missing and which relevant projects depend on the missing parts? What are the core benefits compared to e.g. ECL or CLISP?

New comment by Rochus in "QBE – Compiler Back End"

Rochus — Fri, 08 May 2026 18:17:28 +0000

There are reports by independend testers (e.g. https://briancallahan.net/blog/20211010.html or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40350384) suggesting that range.

New comment by Rochus in "QBE – Compiler Back End"

Rochus — Fri, 08 May 2026 17:11:28 +0000

Interesting, thanks for posting. I had a first look and think that the AI has messed up with the floating-point and casting instructions (i.e. just copied over the RV instructions). I also spotted other places (e.g. TLS) which look like RV. It's also surprising that the code - as you say - is so much slower than (optimized?) GCC, since QBE is assumed to be at 70-80%.

New comment by Rochus in "QBE – Compiler Back End"

Rochus — Fri, 08 May 2026 15:44:39 +0000

> it's like one Claude prompt to add MIPS support to this

Can you provide the code somewhere? Is it complete? Does it really work? I have a hard time to believe that an LLM really can generate a complete and working backend for a target architecture with "one prompt". From my experience with such tools, by the end of the day it takes longer until it covers all edge cases and actually works than when writing it myself.

New comment by Rochus in "Odin, Wikipedia and Engagement Farming"

Rochus — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:17:31 +0000

Rename it to "Pickypedia".

New comment by Rochus in "Audion – Music Sequencing Language"

Rochus — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:32:41 +0000

Interesting. How does it compare to e.g. Faust or the SuperCollider language? What's the "unique selling point" of Audion compared to other "music programming languages"?

New comment by Rochus in "RaTeX: KaTeX-compatible LaTeX rendering engine in pure Rust"

Rochus — Mon, 04 May 2026 22:25:33 +0000

Interesting. Reminds me of Typst (both implemented in Rust and replacing TeX to some degree) and Microtex.

New comment by Rochus in "Designing Microkernel IPC"

Rochus — Mon, 04 May 2026 13:09:12 +0000

Neither the whole L4 line of work, which fundamentally rely on synchronous, rendezvous-style IPC as their primary kernel-level communication primitive; the transition to synchronous IPC together with the specific way it was designed was absolutely central to the dramatic performance improvements of L4 over first-generation microkernels like Mach. QNX independently pioneered many of the concepts that define successful microkernels.

New comment by Rochus in "Think pop music is basic? Even classical and jazz are getting less complex"

Rochus — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:59:58 +0000

Complexity in music is a very ambiguous "measure". Look at e.g. Brubeck's "Take five", which many consider "complex" because of the unusual time signature; but it's actually a pretty simple piece. On the other hand, look at "minimal music" such as e.g. Steve Reich's "Music for 18 musicians"; it's based on just a few simple rules, but the resul is far from simple. When even the topic of a study is ambiguous, what can we expect from the results.

Show HN: Oberon System 3 on Raspi Zero 2 (with ready SD card)

Rochus — Sun, 03 May 2026 15:35:51 +0000

A match made in heaven ;-)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47997982

Points: 5

# Comments: 0

New comment by Rochus in "Dotcl: Common Lisp Implementation on .NET"

Rochus — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 23:32:00 +0000

This is amazing. How long did it take you to implement it, i.e. reach that high level of Ansi test conformance? Have you been able to reuse concepts e.g. from ABCL?

New comment by Rochus in "ElevenLabs launches ElevenMusic"

Rochus — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 22:11:53 +0000

What is this? Any description somewhere? Is this rather like Suno or SoundCloud?

New comment by Rochus in "In which Lisp generates music"

Rochus — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:30:50 +0000

I'm aware of Extempore and its predecessor, but I think they pretty much have the same problem, with no elegant solution (at least I didn't see one when studying the docs and thesis). Maybe the trick is indeed - as you say - to implement a "sublanguage" with macros to cover the more complex music representation. Forth is an interesting language, but I think it has even more issues to represent musical information.

New comment by Rochus in "In which Lisp generates music"

Rochus — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 13:09:46 +0000

I'm still not sure on which composition language to focus on. I definitely don't like languages where a lot of the syntax is "hidden" in strings (such as e.g. in Tidal). Lisp has aspects which fit to music intuitively, but as soon as you try to represent the full information expected by Midi the code gets messy. Interestingly, Common Music and Nyquist went away from Lisp towards SAL because composers apparently preferred a Pascal like infix syntax over the Lisp way.

New comment by Rochus in "In which Lisp generates music"

Rochus — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 12:06:45 +0000

Sounds nice, thanks. Do you also have experience in other live coding languages? Can you share your thoughts about advantages/disadvantages of Lisp compared to others?

New comment by Rochus in "The Paradox of Karl Popper"

Rochus — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:00:44 +0000

Popper explains that falsificationism is a methodological-philosophical proposal, what he calls "meta-science", and is therefore not subject to its own criterion; different domains of inquiry operate under different criteria of evaluation. Horgan's "Is falsification falsifiable?" question treats falsificationism as if it were itself an empirical claim, which is a category error.

New comment by Rochus in "Steve Reich reshaped the boundaries of musical time (2025)"

Rochus — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:53:11 +0000

> there is no better background music to code to than Steve Reich

Music for 18 Musicians is indeed very well suited; Bach works also very well for me. But not every piece of the said composers works equally well to support concentration.