Hacker News: pklausler

New comment by pklausler in "Portability of Fortran's 'do concurrent' on GPUs II"

pklausler — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 03:46:11 +0000

People assume that DO CONCURRENT implies that a loop is parallelizable. But the committee botched the standard badly, and the language allows conforming code that is not parallelizable.

New comment by pklausler in "The Road to MS-DOS 2.0"

pklausler — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 21:00:55 +0000

The standard language has had both dumb and smart pointers for 36 years. Based storage has been available as a common extension for over forty.

New comment by pklausler in "Faster floating point math with Rust's new API"

pklausler — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 21:37:34 +0000

They ruled that the “integrity of parentheses” can be violated by fused multiply-adds, despite clear long-standing language to the contrary. So “(x * y)+z” can be compiled as if it were “x * y+z” and only undergo one rounding.

New comment by pklausler in "Faster floating point math with Rust's new API"

pklausler — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:10:44 +0000

Sadly, Fortran’s guarantee of the “integrity of parentheses” has been undermined lately by its standard committee.

New comment by pklausler in "A Forlorn Hope of Fortran Modernisation"

pklausler — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 17:41:23 +0000

This point was weird, since Fortran has never had bitwise operators, as such. (It has had bitwise intrinsic functions since the “mil-spec” extensions in the late 70’s.)

New comment by pklausler in "A Forlorn Hope of Fortran Modernisation"

pklausler — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:20:13 +0000

Fortran seems to attract a lot of this sort of thing, perhaps because the language has had no real leadership since the ISO committee began jumping the shark in the 2000’s.

New comment by pklausler in "The AI era is pulling FP64 hardware away from scientific HPC"

pklausler — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 04:56:18 +0000

That is not a particularly well-informed discussion, unfortunately.

New comment by pklausler in "NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era"

pklausler — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:18:49 +0000

I think that the Voyager software is in assembly languages (there are several distinct computers on board), and that it is the program preparation software is written in a “Fortran V” extension.

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.