Hacker News: needlesslygrim

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Why Objective-C"

needlesslygrim — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 18:53:47 +0000

While Swift now has the `borrowing` and `consuming` keywords, support for storing references is nonexistent, and the only way to return/store `Span`s, etc, is only possible through using experimental `@lifetime` annotations.

Swift is a nice language, and it's new support for the bare necessity of affine types is a good step forward, but it's not at all comparable with Rust.

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Ruby Symbols"

needlesslygrim — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 17:24:49 +0000

> extremely inefficient strings (erlang)

Doesn't most modern Erlang code use binaries instead of charlists? Elixir and Gleam certainly do.

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Systems Programming with Zig"

needlesslygrim — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 20:12:23 +0000

> Rust has some support for zero-runtime, but a lot of it's features is either useless of outright in the way when you are not using a heap.

Could you give some examples?

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Framework Laptop 16"

needlesslygrim — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 16:52:17 +0000

That's good to hear, I guess it's possible a thicker module could be made in the future with more cooling potential?

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Framework Laptop 16"

needlesslygrim — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 15:45:03 +0000

I'm very impressed you managed to get nvidia to give you access to the 5070! I have one queetion though, is the 5070 limited to 100W because of the docking connector, or for cooling reasons?

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu"

needlesslygrim — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 05:52:11 +0000

That makes sense, and it's interesting that both you and Linus Torvalds maintain your own versions of Micro Emacs. Sign of greatness perhaps :)

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Using Microsoft's New CLI Text Editor on Ubuntu"

needlesslygrim — Sun, 22 Jun 2025 15:59:18 +0000

I'm curious, why don't you use GNU Emacs?

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Four Lectures on Standard ML (1989) [pdf]"

needlesslygrim — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 07:19:08 +0000

Oh I see. I assumed being able to explicitly yield unit meant statements were essentially just syntax sugar for unit. Thanks for the correction.

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Four Lectures on Standard ML (1989) [pdf]"

needlesslygrim — Mon, 31 Mar 2025 10:16:37 +0000

Well, Rust barely has statements [1]. Nearly everything in Rust is an expression, and AFAIK statements /are/ essentially expressions that yield `()` [2].

[1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/statements.html

[2]: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&editio...

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Google will develop Android OS behind closed doors starting next week"

needlesslygrim — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 22:27:53 +0000

In China WeChat is the dominant messaging platform, SMS is only used for delivery notifications, spam, etc.

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Ask HN: A retrofitted C dialect?"

needlesslygrim — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 04:53:02 +0000

That's probably fair.

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Ask HN: A retrofitted C dialect?"

needlesslygrim — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 16:34:44 +0000

> Async Rust is painful

On the other hand, I've found normal threading in Rust quite simple (generally using a thread pool).

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Roc rewrites the compiler in Zig"

needlesslygrim — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 15:32:10 +0000

Well if you're going to eat crow, I may as well eat pigeon, for I didn't realise that paper wasn't showing real source.

Thanks for the link to the LCF text though :^)

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Zig; what I think after months of using it"

needlesslygrim — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 15:28:38 +0000

I think this criticism is silly. Here's what your first example would look like in a language with keywords (where reasonable, perhaps like C#) instead:

  pub fn play(in out self, player: mut ref AnimationPlayer lifetime p, new_animation: AnimationNodeIndex, transition_duration: Duration) -> mut ref AnimationPlayer lifetime p

But, this is still confusing! Let's remove even more symbols, and make the syntax more obvious by removing abbreviations:

  PUBLIC FUNCTION Play
  LIFETIMES
    P
  PARAMETERS
    IN OUT Self
  Player AS MUTABLE REFERENCE TO AnimationPlayer WITH LIFETIME P
  NewAnimation AS AnimationNodeIndex
  TransititionDuration AS Duration
  RETURNS MUTABLE REFERENCE TO ActiveAnimation
  BEGIN
  ...
  END

IMO, using keywords instead of symbols for references, lifetimes, etc, would just make Rust overly verbose, and there's a reason BCPL used braces instead of BEGIN/END :^)

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Roc rewrites the compiler in Zig"

needlesslygrim — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 01:08:31 +0000

Well, ML (or at least the first versions of it) used a λx • x syntax [1] for λ-abstractions, the same (excluding the use of • over .) notation as used with the Lambda Calculus, and I've always assumed \ was an ASCII stand in.

[1]: https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/papers-we-love/... (can be spotted on page 353)

New comment by needlesslygrim in ""We're building a new static type checker for Python""

needlesslygrim — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 09:47:37 +0000

Unfortunately, while `dynamic` is used for dynamic typing in C#, `var` is just type inferenfe like `auto` in C++.

Sony Proposes Changing LLVM Clang Default to C++20 Mode

needlesslygrim — Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:54:51 +0000

Article URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Sony-LLVM-Clang-CXX20-Default

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42665533

Points: 13

# Comments: 0

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Swift for C++ Practitioners: Move Semantics"

needlesslygrim — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 03:35:54 +0000

This is interesting because these semantics seems to be a direct(ish) clone of Rust's. I wonder if this moves Swift's performance ceiling closer to Rust's?

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Ghostty 1.0"

needlesslygrim — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 10:36:40 +0000

I'm also interested in why the MIT license was chosen. I guess it's because of the plan to create 'libghostty'?

New comment by needlesslygrim in "Fault Report – and alternative to Result in F#"

needlesslygrim — Sun, 22 Dec 2024 06:31:26 +0000

I agree, this doesn't seem to be much better than adding `throws Throwable` to all your methods that can fail in Java. The reason sum types are so useful for error handling is that all possible cases can be exhaustively checked against at compile time.