Hacker News: anta40

New comment by anta40 in "Competitive Programmer's Handbook (2018) [pdf]"

anta40 — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:21:02 +0000

I think competitive programming only focus on few technical aspects, like: algorithmic thinking, familiary with various data structures, complexity-performance trade-off, etc etc.

Nothing is wrong with that. Think of it as intellectual exercise. Fair enough, real world software development involves other factors.

New comment by anta40 in "The Beatles have permeated research papers across academic disciplines"

anta40 — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 14:56:09 +0000

I'm pretty sure those things already existed before The Beatles. But it's safe to say the Fab 4 acted as a cultural amplifiers, so those things became accessible to global mass market.

New comment by anta40 in "Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers"

anta40 — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 08:40:45 +0000

Hmm wonder why pointer (in general, not only for building data structures like linkedlist etc) isn't discussed.

New comment by anta40 in "Using GCC's Nested Functions with Wide Pointers and No Trampolines II"

anta40 — Sat, 15 Aug 2026 12:04:47 +0000

Say to strictly enforce modularity, e.g helper functions that can only be accessed within its function.

Pascal supports it (at least Turbo Pascal, no idea about ISO Pascal).

New comment by anta40 in "Chicken Scheme 6.0"

anta40 — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 09:46:35 +0000

What about Gambit? Perhaps it's a better, optimizing compiler but the built-in library is rather minimalist?

New comment by anta40 in "Switzerland is a neutral nation but has more nuclear bunkers than any country"

anta40 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 07:05:37 +0000

>> And that's part of the reason why in 2002, Switzerland's government reduced the Sonnenberg bunker capacity from 20,000 to just 2,000. Its floors filled with bunk beds, a prison and hospital, all deep underground, have been repurposed over the years as overflow housing for refugees, asylum seekers and the homeless. It's a use that has been criticized by organizations that help these populations. Some asylum seekers have protested against being housed here. It has never been used for its original intent: to protect people from nuclear fallout. But the Swiss government continues to spend tens of millions of dollars a year to maintain it and hundreds of thousands of other bunkers throughout the country — just in case.

Oh well...

New comment by anta40 in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

anta40 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 08:50:25 +0000

Mr Kusswurm's x86 book is excellent. Didn't know he also write on for ARM. Thank you!

New comment by anta40 in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

anta40 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:47:34 +0000

Since NASM/YASM is written in C, it's more portable. On my ARM Mac, NASM works fine.

FASM is cool (and still being development), but since it's written in 32-bit x86 asm, let's just say macOS is a 2nd class citizen.

New comment by anta40 in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

anta40 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:36:01 +0000

You mean this:

https://www.amazon.com/Art-ARM-Assembly-Randall-Hyde/dp/1718... ?

Mmm nice. Will give it a try since ARM-based Mac is my main working environment nowadays.

New comment by anta40 in "The Art of 64-bit Assembly"

anta40 — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 22:30:55 +0000

Not exactly weird... I mean x64 Windows is still pretty popular. And pretty much any Windows dev will have Visual Studio installed (to get MASM).

Unless, you want to use open source MASM-compatible assemblers like JWASM or UASM.

Yes I understand, other folks may prefer Linux/BSD, NASM/FASM, ARM etc etc.

New comment by anta40 in "Teaching Kids Forth"

anta40 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 10:01:30 +0000

>> but personally I'd like to teach my kid how a computer works, not how to use some programming language.

I wonder if assembly is a better choice... hmmm...

New comment by anta40 in "Scriptc by Vercel: TypeScript-to-Native compiler, no JavaScript engine in binary"

anta40 — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:08:06 +0000

Does this mean I can turn my JS-based backend into single executable and easily ship it, like in Go?

New comment by anta40 in "In-browser programmable robot simulator"

anta40 — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:05:33 +0000

Works fine on 152.0.5 (aarch64) macOS 26.5.2. I don't use extensions like NoScript etc etc

New comment by anta40 in "EndBASIC 0.14: Are we multimedia yet?"

anta40 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:18:59 +0000

If you like QuickBASIC, perhaps FreeBASIC is also an interesting choice.

For many years, it practically only supports Windows, Linux, and DOS. Now add macOS into the list: https://deb.fbxl.net/macos/

New comment by anta40 in "Poly/ML – A Standard ML Implementation"

anta40 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 07:55:30 +0000

OCaml seems nice for doing real world app development (e.g) web backend, and not limited only for prog lang research.

Hmmm....

New comment by anta40 in "Blaise v0.10.0: Native Back End, Threads and Incremental Compilation"

anta40 — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 04:19:44 +0000

Ahh just noticed it's made by graemeg, one of FPC long time contributors.

Many years ago I explored his fpGUI:

https://fpgui.sourceforge.net/ fpGUI Toolkit is a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal

Nice to see you are not only limited to Lazarus

New comment by anta40 in "HeidiSQL – Lightweight MariaDB, MySQL, SQL Server, PostgreSQL and SQLite Manager"

anta40 — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:42:59 +0000

Mmmmm just noticed MacOS is now supported. Guess time to say farewell to DBeaver...

New comment by anta40 in "Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone"

anta40 — Sat, 16 May 2026 10:43:06 +0000

So which one has the biggest chance to be Android/iOS alternative?

Many many years ago, smarphone users had these choices:

Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, PalmOS... what else?

New comment by anta40 in "Show HN: Trust – Coding Rust like it's 1989"

anta40 — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:16:28 +0000

Just noticed in cannot build a standalone Rust source file

"error: could not find 'Cargo.toml'"

I assume first need to create a project by "cargo new" ...?

Anyway, love the good ol' Turbo Pascal 7 Reference. Haven't touch it for more than 1 decade.

New comment by anta40 in "Show HN: TRUST – Coding Rust like it's 1989"

anta40 — Thu, 07 May 2026 15:07:03 +0000

>> Rust is notorious for its slow compile times

Don't forget Haskell. And what's other... C++, OCaml, etc?

I guess a language with complex/complicated design is difficult to be compiled "blazing fast"