Hacker News: nuudlman

New comment by nuudlman in "Formally Verifying Peephole Optimisations in Lean"

nuudlman — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 15:01:21 +0000

I'm not sure about moral per se, but LLVM is practically a painful dependency—it doesn't have API compatibility between versions, release builds are rapidly approaching a gigabyte, you are given some franken-version by the system, and you won't have a good time if you end up linking/loading more than one version for whatever reason.

IIRC there was also some case where an LLVM bump caused tcmalloc to explode inside wine.

New comment by nuudlman in "OBS Studio Gets a New Renderer"

nuudlman — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 22:07:53 +0000

Vulkan capture support on Windows was introduced in v25 (on linux you need to use a plugin). There is no Vulkan renderer support—which the post clearly stated...

New comment by nuudlman in "Capsudo: Rethinking sudo with object capabilities"

nuudlman — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 05:01:33 +0000

This feels like pfexec on Illumos/Solaris, although I’m too unqualified to say for certain.

New comment by nuudlman in "Zig asserts are not C asserts"

nuudlman — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 19:53:29 +0000

With the common case of SimplifyCFG turning this into an assumption (for ReleaseFast), this is UB (LLVM def) unless you can prove that the assumption always holds.

I suppose that's par for the course with an unchecked release build, but at the same time memory corruption is much easier to debug as compared to 'the compiler changed the logic of my program in strange/incorrect ways'.

New comment by nuudlman in "Precompiled headers and why Squid won't be using them (2023)"

nuudlman — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 07:04:08 +0000

Do you have any specific examples here?

While no compiler is perfect (e.g., pointer provenance), one could just as easily argue that Clang has higher quality—most modern C/++ tooling is built on it, sanitizers are brought up in Clang and sometimes ported to GCC later, all of the modern safety work is in Clang (-Wbounds-safety, the various thread safety approaches, lifetime analysis, Sean’s borrow checked C++, Fil-C). The Clang static analyzer has also been used in production for over a decade, whereas -fanalyzer is still experimental and limited to C, …

I have the feeling that the bugs that aren’t being fixed are either because the bug report is unactionable (3yr old Ubuntu Franken-clang is slower than than 3yr old franken-gcc) or because the problem is very non-trivial (e.g., you can find recent discussion about enabling dependence analysis by default, the aforementioned pointer provenance issues stemming from C, ABI/lowering warts around large _BitInt)

New comment by nuudlman in "Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?"

nuudlman — Sat, 01 Mar 2025 22:55:55 +0000

Take a look at Pony https://www.ponylang.io/

New comment by nuudlman in "Compilation on the GPU? A Feasibility Study"

nuudlman — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 15:20:02 +0000

Linking is very parallelizable: see the mold linker for a demonstration.

New comment by nuudlman in "Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle"

nuudlman — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 22:41:55 +0000

It's a lot faster to add a log point in a debugger than to add a print statement and recompile. Especially with cargo check, I really don't see the point of non-debuggable builds (outside of embedded, but the size of debuginfo already makes that a non-starter).

New comment by nuudlman in "Speeding up the Rust edit-build-run cycle"

nuudlman — Thu, 14 Nov 2024 20:02:16 +0000

Not linking debug info must be some kind of sick joke. What is the point of a debug build without symbols?

Show HN: Launching my blog by talking about improving C++ build perf

nuudlman — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 16:33:21 +0000

The techniques discussed aren't anything new, but they might be useful if you are still using Makefiles.

I'm new to blog writing, so please leave feedback so I can improve!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41649179

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by nuudlman in "Testing AMD's Bergamo: Zen 4c"

nuudlman — Sun, 23 Jun 2024 02:11:54 +0000

The fun thing with branch predictors is that they tell you where the next branch is (among other things like the direction of the branch). Since hardware is built out of finite wires, the prediction will saturate to some maximum distance (something in the next few cache lines).

How this affects decode clusters is left as an exercise to the reader.

New comment by nuudlman in "Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System (2017)"

nuudlman — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 01:18:00 +0000

A lot of this seems like it's done by Arcan (https://arcan-fe.com)

New comment by nuudlman in "Arena-based parsers"

nuudlman — Thu, 09 May 2024 00:31:17 +0000

This talk was enormously educational when I first dove into LLVM and modern compilers last January—Chandler is a great speaker.