Hacker News: igouy

New comment by igouy in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

igouy — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:39:49 +0000

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t much care where–” said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

“–so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

New comment by igouy in "Python: The Optimization Ladder"

igouy — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 19:18:31 +0000

> "The Benchmarks Game problems are pure compute: tight loops, no I/O, no data structures beyond arrays."

iirc reverse-complement reads and writes a GB, fasta and mandelbrot write, regex-redux reads, k-nucleotide reads and uses a hash table.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

New comment by igouy in "SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]"

igouy — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:59:30 +0000

In that case

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47354288

New comment by igouy in "Python: The Optimization Ladder"

igouy — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 18:47:46 +0000

Here are a few naive un-optimised single-thread #8 programs transliterated line-by-line literal style into different programming languages from the same original.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

New comment by igouy in "SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]"

igouy — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:45:21 +0000

Does "originally" mean before release from the offices and corridors of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.

Perhaps further back: before change sets, before fileOut, before sources and change log ? There's a lot of history.

I wonder if the Digitalk Smalltalk implementation "has objects inside that go back to 1977".

New comment by igouy in "Type resolution redesign, with language changes to taste"

igouy — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 17:07:08 +0000

Fruit = { Apple, Cucumber, … }

Veg = { Cucumber, … }

Fruit As In = Fruit − Veg

New comment by igouy in "SBCL: A Sanely-Bootstrappable Common Lisp (2008) [pdf]"

igouy — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 17:26:48 +0000

The image is not stand-alone: there should also be a sources file and a changes file (and of course a virtual machine).

"When you use a browser to access a method, the system has to retrieve the source code for that method. Initially all the source code is found in the file we refer to as the sources file. … As you are evaluating expressions or making changes to class descriptions, your actions are logged onto an external file that we refer to as the changes file. If you change a method, the new source code is stored on the changes file, not back into the sources file. Thus the sources file is treated as shared and immutable; a private changes file must exist for each user."

1984 "Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment" page 458

The image is a cache. For a reproducible process, version and archive source-code.

1984 "Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment" page 500

"At the outset of a project involving two or more programmers: Do assign a member of the team to be the version manager. … The responsibilities of the version manager consist of collecting and cataloging code files submitted by all members of the team, periodically building a new system image incorporating all submitted code files, and releasing the image for use by the team. The version manager stores the current release and all code files for that release in a central place, allowing team members read access, and disallowing write access for anyone except the version manager."

New comment by igouy in "Ki Editor - an editor that operates on the AST"

igouy — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 18:25:13 +0000

> Refactorings were defined as syntactically correct transformation of one AST into another

Refactorings preserved behavior.

Maybe that isn't what we wanted:

"A very large Smalltalk application was developed at Cargill to support the operation of grain elevators and the associated commodity trading activities. The Smalltalk client application has 385 windows and over 5,000 classes. About 2,000 classes in this application interacted with an early (circa 1993) data access framework. The framework dynamically performed a mapping of object attributes to data table columns.

Analysis showed that although dynamic look up consumed 40% of the client execution time, it was unnecessary.

A new data layer interface was developed that required the business class to provide the object attribute to column mapping in an explicitly coded method. Testing showed that this interface was orders of magnitude faster. The issue was how to change the 2,100 business class users of the data layer.

A large application under development cannot freeze code while a transformation of an interface is constructed and tested. We had to construct and test the transformations in a parallel branch of the code repository from the main development stream. When the transformation was fully tested, then it was applied to the main code stream in a single operation.

Less than 35 bugs were found in the 17,100 changes. All of the bugs were quickly resolved in a three-week period.

If the changes were done manually we estimate that it would have taken 8,500 hours, compared with 235 hours to develop the transformation rules.

The task was completed in 3% of the expected time by using Rewrite Rules. This is an improvement by a factor of 36."

from “Transformation of an application data layer” Will Loew-Blosser OOPSLA 2002

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/604251.604258

New comment by igouy in "Working on Pharo Smalltalk: BPatterns: Rewrite Engine with Smalltalk Style"

igouy — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 22:50:57 +0000

Is there a known example of that for any language?

New comment by igouy in "Boilerplate Tax – Ranking popular programming languages by density"

igouy — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:47:56 +0000

And yet, it may still be "a better gauge for code density".

New comment by igouy in "Boilerplate Tax – Ranking popular programming languages by density"

igouy — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 16:46:34 +0000

> … is not a good representation of typical code.

afaict that's unknown and "typical" weasel word and median.

New comment by igouy in "LT6502: A 6502-based homebrew laptop"

igouy — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 18:11:48 +0000

Perhaps decades ago there was "more sophisticated versioning" for Smalltalk implementations:

2001 "Mastering ENVY/Developer".

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Mastering_ENVY_Develope...

New comment by igouy in "JavaScript-heavy approaches are not compatible with long-term performance goals"

igouy — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 17:57:23 +0000

Now, instead-of hand-written vector instructions, look at programs transliterated line-by-line literal style into different programming languages from the same original:

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...