Hacker News: generichuman

New comment by generichuman in "Zig Libc"

generichuman — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:01:43 +0000

That's cool. I imagine I could also maintain a MinGW package that can be downloaded through the Zig package manager and statically linked without involving the zig libc? (Such that the user doesn't need to install anything but zig)

That's a good way to sell moving over to the zig build system, and eventually zig the language itself in some real-world scenarios imo.

New comment by generichuman in "Zig Libc"

generichuman — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 00:55:49 +0000

This is very exciting for zig projects linking C libraries. Though I'm curious about the following case:

Let's say I'm building a C program targeting Windows with MinGW & only using Zig as a cross compiler. Is there a way to still statically link MinGW's libc implementation or does this mean that's going away and I can only statically link ziglibc even if it looks like MinGW from the outside?

Pico GPU is a 300KB memory GPU intended to learn and experiment with shaders

generichuman — Sun, 11 Jan 2026 20:35:47 +0000

Article URL: https://ncannasse.github.io/picogpu/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579721

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by generichuman in "Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux"

generichuman — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 15:25:20 +0000

Check Detour out: https://github.com/graphitemaster/detour?tab=readme-ov-file#...

I suspect with combination of Detour & Zapps it could be possible.

New comment by generichuman in "Loss32: Let's Build a Win32/Linux"

generichuman — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:21:55 +0000

Can you build GUI programs with this? I'm thinking anything that would depend on GPU drivers. Anything built with SDL, OpenGL, Vulkan, whatever.

New comment by generichuman in "KaTeX – The fastest math typesetting library for the web"

generichuman — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 16:37:33 +0000

If your use case is generating html, MathML is supported in all modern browsers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/MathML#browser_...

Producing Open Source Software – 2nd edition

generichuman — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 15:25:11 +0000

Article URL: https://producingoss.com/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45790967

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by generichuman in "Detour: Dynamic linking on Linux without Libc"

generichuman — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:34:54 +0000

I will be even more impressed with linux syscall stability if your implication is that (some) people need to recompile their software for each major update on all other UNIXes.

New comment by generichuman in "Detour: Dynamic linking on Linux without Libc"

generichuman — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 10:25:47 +0000

I'm only thinking in terms of Linux distributions since I never needed to deploy software on other UNIXes (excluding macOS, but Apple constantly forces changes anyway).

Do other UNIXes have any problems similar to glibc ABI problems that Linux users experience, or do they stabilise the libc ABI similar to how Linux keeps syscalls stable?

New comment by generichuman in "Detour: Dynamic linking on Linux without Libc"

generichuman — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 09:45:59 +0000

That doesn't give you independence from the libc, does it? By extension you lose distro-independence too (not sure if Detour supports musl-based ones, need to run tests).

Agree that IPC will be more secure and stable though.

I imagine Detour is mostly targeting closed source projects trying to run on as many distros as possible.

NJVL: Nim's New Intermediate Representation

generichuman — Thu, 30 Oct 2025 01:44:25 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/nim-lang/nimony/blob/master/doc/njvl-spec.md

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45755495

Points: 78

# Comments: 9

Detour: Dynamic linking on Linux without Libc

generichuman — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 22:42:16 +0000

Article URL: https://github.com/graphitemaster/detour

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740241

Points: 79

# Comments: 8

New comment by generichuman in "Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot"

generichuman — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 18:36:30 +0000

That's only true if you're making CRUD software and easily replaceable by any random programmer. For anything more serious LLMs are only useful as a better search engine.

New comment by generichuman in "The Hardware Knowledge That Every Programmer Should Know"

generichuman — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 10:27:57 +0000

Keep in mind there _may_ be a negative feedback loop there.

If you're building your software in a way that won't be able to perform better with superior disk/db/network performance, then it isn't worthwhile to ever upgrade to a more performant disk/db/network.

If it is possible, make sure your software will actually be faster on a faster disk rather than just testing on a slow disk and thinking "well we're I/O bound anyway, so no need to improve perf".

New comment by generichuman in "Go 1.25 Release Notes"

generichuman — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 21:45:29 +0000

All fair, but:

> As for the "...latest version of the SDKs..", that is moving the goal posts, there is no mention of it on [...]

I thought it was implied since tooling & library breakages over the years happen and sometimes you can't just get the old SDK to run on the latest Windows / macOS. If the languages and Ant/Maven are backwards compatible to that extent, that's actually pretty good!

I had to deal with moving a .NET Framework 4.7 project to .NET Standard 2.0 and it wasn't effortless (although upgrading to each new .NET release after that has been pretty simple so far). We took a couple of weeks even though we had minimal dependencies since we're careful about that stuff.

New comment by generichuman in "Go 1.25 Release Notes"

generichuman — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 20:22:00 +0000

Okay, C++ is believable, but can you really build a Java / .NET project that was not touched for 20+ years with no changes to the code or the build process (while also using the latest version of the SDKs)?

I imagine you can _make_ a project compile with some amount of effort (thinking maybe a week at most) but they wouldn't be exactly "unzip the old archive and execute ./build.bat".

New comment by generichuman in "You do not need NixOS on the desktop"

generichuman — Sat, 17 May 2025 13:16:40 +0000

I landed on "immutable distros by default for average users" as well. It is a more Windows/macOS like experience where it is much harder to mess up the system.

Flatpak guarantees everything will work in most cases, and for other cases there's AppImage. Just need to get most devs to distribute AppImages. BoxBuddy with distrobox will solve _all_ edge cases where someone says "X works with Y in Z on my machine" so you replicate their machine in distrobox.

I know this is trading program size with convenience, but that's what Windows and macOS does too. It is better to be on some immutable linux distro rather than Windows in my opinion. We don't have to force the average person who just wants their computer to work to install (extreme example) Gentoo or whatever.

Teal – A statically-typed dialect of Lua

generichuman — Fri, 16 May 2025 00:40:35 +0000

Article URL: https://teal-language.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44000759

Points: 229

# Comments: 173

Windows User Space Emulator

generichuman — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 14:30:54 +0000

Article URL: https://momo5502.github.io/emulator/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43728427

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The state of binary compatibility on Linux and how to address it

generichuman — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 22:22:46 +0000

Article URL: https://jangafx.com/insights/linux-binary-compatibility

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43551934

Points: 201

# Comments: 143