Hacker News: bnolsen

New comment by bnolsen in "Zig → Rust porting guide"

bnolsen — Tue, 05 May 2026 22:34:39 +0000

Unit tests in zig will fail if the tested code leaks memory.

New comment by bnolsen in "Show HN: Xit – a Git-compatible VCS written in Zig"

bnolsen — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 12:57:18 +0000

I guess the 'zit' name was already taken by something else.

New comment by bnolsen in "Every GPU That Mattered"

bnolsen — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:32:21 +0000

The radeon 8500 deserves to be on that list. It still has active Linux support under mesa.

New comment by bnolsen in "Why are we still using Markdown?"

bnolsen — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:14:07 +0000

HTML is not something to hold up as the standard for documentation.

New comment by bnolsen in "Show HN: Dynamod – Linux init with Erlang-style supervisor trees"

bnolsen — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:47:51 +0000

Why not just use zig for the entire thing?

New comment by bnolsen in "Zig Libc"

bnolsen — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:44:04 +0000

Not to be confused with zlib.

New comment by bnolsen in "Zig Libc"

bnolsen — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 12:41:10 +0000

Except for all the baggage it carries along with it including hacks to address baggage resulting in a very bloated language.

New comment by bnolsen in "Quaternion Algebras"

bnolsen — Sat, 31 Jan 2026 18:30:37 +0000

Quaternions are left handed spinors. Please use the correct unified math models (clidfford algebra) rather than these 3d only hacks.

New comment by bnolsen in "Lightpanda migrate DOM implementation to Zig"

bnolsen — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 04:59:02 +0000

Having worked with c++ strings and also string views I find zigs simple fat pointer to be fairly direct and straightforward, and a bit refreshing. Ownership is being coupled in with the type..

New comment by bnolsen in "Why is calling my asm function from Rust slower than calling it from C?"

bnolsen — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 21:03:45 +0000

And then zig shows up...

New comment by bnolsen in "Phoenix: A modern X server written from scratch in Zig"

bnolsen — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 00:03:09 +0000

It's christmas and not april fools!

New comment by bnolsen in "Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS"

bnolsen — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 15:58:44 +0000

I remember seeing this a long time ago and liking it, I just didn't have a use for it at the time. How does it stack up against luahit for perf and memory, and threading? It also looks like it could be worth looking at porting the compiler to zig which excels at both compiler writing and cross platform tooling.

New comment by bnolsen in "Local AI is driving the biggest change in laptops in decades"

bnolsen — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 05:05:21 +0000

Work gave me an m1 pro with 32gb on it. A year ago I put together one of those minisforum board+laptop apu with 64gb ram and 2tb nvme for not much money at the time, likely 500usd. For the performance sensitive software I was working on the 7935hs ran with about 50x more throughout using compilers with llvm backend.

New comment by bnolsen in "Show HN: I built a fast RSS reader in Zig"

bnolsen — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:19:13 +0000

There's active work towards that (which could run as part of CI) and it looks very promising: https://github.com/ityonemo/clr

New comment by bnolsen in "Show HN: I built a fast RSS reader in Zig"

bnolsen — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 18:17:39 +0000

Zig actually does bring some new and innovative ideas to programming. While Zig itself may not become the next big thing a lot of ideas in it most certainly will find their way into languages moving forward.

New comment by bnolsen in "Going Through Snowden Documents, Part 1"

bnolsen — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:56:21 +0000

And they tried to hang him for it. I wasn't particularly pleased with some actions he took after he ran off but the government reaction was truly out of hand and forced him into full survival mode. This part of government is full of weird power crazed spooks.

New comment by bnolsen in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

bnolsen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:29:02 +0000

they are very awkward to use in the current STL, they are part of the template definition. Back in the day EASTL did allocators much better but it never became a thing.

New comment by bnolsen in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

bnolsen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:26:11 +0000

This confuses me. In zig null pointers are illegal, and I have yet to run into any case that should be addressed by using pointer arithmetic, that's all taken care of with slices.

New comment by bnolsen in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

bnolsen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 14:04:16 +0000

you could fully redesign libc to be modern and toss out the null terminated string concept and use fat pointers and slices. But at that point why not consider moving onto a more modern language with things like explicit type conversions, modern PEG type grammar, etc.

New comment by bnolsen in "Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig"

bnolsen — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 13:59:24 +0000

I might buy your argument except that without corporate sponsorship for zig several projects using a very young and unfinished zig exhibit world class performance and utility, apparently without herculean effort.