Hacker News: pklausler

New comment by pklausler in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

pklausler — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 08:48:42 +0000

I’m glad you like it.

New comment by pklausler in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

pklausler — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 01:32:20 +0000

There are good reasons to use Fortran, some having to do with the language and many to do with legacy codes. These have to be balanced with the good reasons to avoid using Fortran for new development, which also have to do with the language and its compilers.

New comment by pklausler in "Reflections on 30 years of HPC programming"

pklausler — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:36:47 +0000

Honestly, if a language can't succeed in HPC alongside (or against) Fortran with its glacial rate of buggy evolution and poor track record of portability, and C++ with its never-ending attempts at parallelism, then it's not what HPC needs.

(What HPC does need, IMNSHO, is to disband or disregard WG5/J3, get people who know what they're doing to fix the features they've botched or neglected for thirty years, and then have new procurements include RFCs that demand the fixed portable Fortran from system integrators rather than the ISO "standard".)

New comment by pklausler in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"

pklausler — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:45:26 +0000

I have worked on compilers (mostly) for high-performance computing for over 40 years, writing every part of a production compiler twice or more. Optimization and code generation and register allocation/scheduling are definitely the most fun -- but the hardest work is in parsing and semantics, where "hardest" means it takes the most work to get things right for the language and to deal with user errors in the most graceful and informative manner. This is especially true for badly specified legacy languages like Fortran.

New comment by pklausler in "CUDA Released in Basic"

pklausler — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:40:47 +0000

CUDA Fortran was first released in 2007 and now has multiple implementations.

New comment by pklausler in "CUDA Released in Basic"

pklausler — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 23:39:15 +0000

I don't think that BASIC was ever meant to be a better Fortran. Can you substantiate that claim?

New comment by pklausler in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

pklausler — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 17:19:17 +0000

I have a few patents, including one for a novel machine instruction, and I recall the attorney telling me that one cannot patent mathematics, only methods and systems.

New comment by pklausler in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"

pklausler — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:58:15 +0000

I used a small custom parser combinator library to parse Fortran from raw characters (since tokenization is so context-dependent), and it's worked well.

New comment by pklausler in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"

pklausler — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:55:01 +0000

Production compilers must have robust error recovery and great error messages, and those are pretty straightforward in recursive descent, even if ad hoc.

New comment by pklausler in "I Quit. The Clankers Won"

pklausler — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:38:08 +0000

> First let’s accept the realities. The giant plagiarism machines have already stolen everything. Copyright is dead. Licenses are washed away in clean rooms. Mass surveillance and tracking are a feature, privacy is a bug. Everything is an “algorithm” optimised to exploit.

Suppose that I have discovered a novel algorithm that solves an important basic problem much more efficiently than current techniques do. How do I hide it from the web scrapers that will steal it if I put it on GitHub or elsewhere? Should I just write it up as a paper and be content with citations and minor glory? Or should I capture AI search results today for "write me code that does X", put my new code up under a restrictive license, capture search results a day later, demonstrate that an AI scraper has acquired the algorithm in violation of the license, and seek damages?

New comment by pklausler in "Intuiting Pratt Parsing"

pklausler — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:19:31 +0000

Is there a production compiler out there that doesn't use recursive descent, preferably constructed from combinators? Table-driven parsers seem now to be a "tell" of an old compiler or a hobby project.

New comment by pklausler in "Slop is not necessarily the future"

pklausler — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 17:49:38 +0000

The free market ensures that bridges stay up, because the bridge-makers don't want to get sued by people who have died in bridge collapses.

New comment by pklausler in "Combinators"

pklausler — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:42:44 +0000

The logical combinators that I know all have definitions in the untyped lambda calculus. Is there a typed variant of logical combinators?

New comment by pklausler in "Take better notes, by hand"

pklausler — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 22:34:30 +0000

Enjoy!

New comment by pklausler in "Take better notes, by hand"

pklausler — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 17:40:49 +0000

If you like Leuchtterm, you'll love Quo Vadis Habana notebooks, if you can find them in stock.

New comment by pklausler in "Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran"

pklausler — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 18:35:00 +0000

We're definitely enforcing some of them. But the latest one from F'2023 isn't going to be.

New comment by pklausler in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

pklausler — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:03:10 +0000

"The system worked yesterday, so it should have worked forever."

New comment by pklausler in "Monuses and Heaps"

pklausler — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:52:12 +0000

The second paragraph describes the motivation. I encourage you to read the paper.

New comment by pklausler in "Reports of code's death are greatly exaggerated"

pklausler — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 18:16:07 +0000

This would also mean that we should design new programming languages out of sight of LLMs in case we need to hide code from them.

New comment by pklausler in "Show HN: We built a terminal-only Bluesky / AT Proto client written in Fortran"

pklausler — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:04:30 +0000

For a standardized language, Fortran isn’t very portable across compilers. GNU Fortran has done a great job supporting legacy features, and I hope that our work in flang-new has made it easy to port to, as well. I basically ignored the zealots who wanted flang-new to be a strict compiler by default. The hobbyist project LFortran is quite the opposite, and will yell at you by default for perfectly conforming variations in keyword spelling. For those who like that sort of thing, that’s exactly the sort of thing that they like.