Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49320169

Points: 19

# Comments: 4

So the goal for C3 is to also be used where you'd use C/C++/Swift/ObjC today.

Just some incremental improvements.

If you haven't tried C3, feel free to jump to https://learn-c3.org and try it in the browser.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48904766

Points: 25

# Comments: 6

Yes there are ways around it if you have patience, but what the heck!!

Which led to the rather odd result that the interpretation of an article's message by a Wikipedia editor was favoured over the explicit statement by the article's author.

Here I would have thought that it would have been prudent to simply leave out that part of speculation, but they adamantly insisted it should stay.

I must add that this happened on Swedish wikipedia, not the main English Wikipedia – which I actually found much more balanced. But the problem is that this mechanism exists in the first place.

It was at the time (5-10 years ago?) well known that the Wikipedia of some language – I don't recall which one – was at the time pretty much hijacked by a group. Oh, wait I found it - the Croatian Wikipedia.

This is unlikely to happen to the main Wikipedia, but it does demonstrate a certain brittleness and risk of bias in the system.

Its biggest advantage over traditional encyclopedias was its breadth and how quickly it could be updated. The trade-off was that articles could vary greatly in quality and could be edited by anyone, making accuracy less consistent than in traditionally edited reference works. So the effort to reduce breadth and say it shouldn't be updated quick... that's just strikes me (as someone fairly old) as kind of funny.

This has boths pros and cons. The good thing about it, is that these people are deeply invested in Wikipedia and therefore have a lot of incitament to do what (they believe at least) is the best for Wikipedia.

The downsides are: (1) that just because you invested a lot of time into Wikipedia you don't have biases (2) you are not immediately qualified to determine whether some article/source is bad or not from a factual point of view.

Also, it's very HARD to become a regular contributor, because you'll have to invest an insane amount of time initially to build up goodwill and reputation, when at the same time anything you do might just get reverted because someone thought it was too much detail or bad in some other way.

So it's a very punishing environment which makes sure that the actual group of Wikipedia editors is a fraction of what one could expect. (Also, the Wikipedia markup... it's really the worst dialect of Wiki syntax)

Anyway, all of this is probably not good for Wikipedia in the long run. LLM's will be much better than humans at creating "beginner" articles, and it will be increasingly hard to know what's LLM-authored. So I expect Wikipedia to go the way of Stack Overflow in the long run.

C3 just has everything C compatible so not just calling into C but also C calling to C3 is just completely normal with no special compatibility types/functions, unlike Zig.

So which one has the most compelling feature kind of boils down to what one focuses on.

You can find Odin users that praise Odin for finding their sweet spot. Similarly for C3 users, just like Zig users.

And in each of those, they will say that the others didn’t quite match what they wanted (not in all cases though: the relatively high visibility of Zig means a lot of its users is unaware of the languages with less visibility, and just pick it by default)

One thing that’s sometimes overlooked though is that all donations are something that we’re grateful for, regardless of amount. If you have little to spend then even $1 a month is an investment that rivals $10000 by someone rich.

Also worth remembering is that the vast majority of language projects aren’t operating at Zig’s scale. For smaller projects such as C3, even modest recurring support can have a meaningful impact on long-term sustainability.

It doesn’t need to be $100000s a month to make a huge difference.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48489073

Points: 1

# Comments: 0