[–] 2 points 1 year ago

I can take this one: Because he doesn’t actually care about creating anything of value. If he truly believed in it, you’re right, Twitter or even Tesla’s software engineers would be on the chopping block and he’d replace them with AI as soon as he can. But he doesn’t.

He knows this is a longshot. Most likely to fail, but very profitable on the near-impossible chance that it works. But he doesn’t care even if the odds are truly impossible. Because this is an investment opportunity, so people will throw money his way, no matter what the odds.

People assume he’s an idiot, and he is. But he’s not stupid, at least not in every way. He certainly has a skill for separating others from their money, which he happily takes advantage of.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I don’t understand why you’re getting downvoted. While I don’t share your conviction, I do admit it’s certainly a possibility.

    The advantage of doing things that way is that code becomes much more portable. We may finally reach the goal of “write once, run anywhere”, because the AI may write all the platform specific code.

    It does make a big assumption that the AI output is reliable enough though. At times people will want to tweak the output, so how are they gonna go about that? Maybe if the language is based on Markdown, you can inject snippets of code where necessary. But if you have to do that too often, such a language will lose its appeal.

    There’s a lot of unknowns, but I see why it’s a tempting idea.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    tsc is (very) slow and there are also no convenient ways to interact with it from Rust.

    So it saves a lot development and CI time to roll our own. The downside is that our inference still isn’t as good as tsc of course, but we’re hopeful the community can help us get very close at least.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Heh, I agree with everything you said, but I’m afraid such a framework is impossible to create, let alone implement. It’s impossible to foresee the infinite possibilities for people to screw themselves through bad decisions, so all you’d create is a lot of bureaucracy to still end up in the same place.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    It’s that the compiler doesn’t help you with preventing race conditions. This makes some problems so hard to solve in C that C programmers simply stay away from attempting it, because they fear the complexity involved.

    It’s a variation of the same theme: Maybe a C programmer could do it too, given infinite time and skill. But in practice it’s often not feasible.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Which one should I pick then, that is both as fast as the std solutions in the other languages and as reusable for arbitrary use cases?

    Because it sounds like your initial pick made you loose the machine efficiency argument and you can’t have it both ways.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I’m not saying you can’t, but it’s a lot more work to use such solutions, to say nothing about their quality compared to std solutions in other languages.

    And it’s also just one example. If we bring multi-threading into it, we’re opening another can of worms where C doesn’t particularly shine.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Well, let’s be real: many C programs don’t want to rely on Glib, and licensing (as the other reply mentioned) is only one reason. Glib is not exactly known for high performance, and is significantly slower than the alternatives supported by the other languages I mentioned.

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  • [–] 27 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    I would argue that because C is so hard to program in, even the claim to machine efficiency is arguable. Yes, if you have infinite time for implementation, then C is among the most efficient, but then the same applies to C++, Rust and Zig too, because with infinite time any artificial hurdle can be cleared by the programmer.

    In practice however, programmers have limited time. That means they need to use the tools of the language to save themselves time. Languages with higher levels of abstraction make it easier, not harder, to reach high performance, assuming the abstractions don’t provide too much overhead. C++, Rust and Zig all apply in this domain.

    An example is the situation where you need a hash map or B-Tree map to implement efficient lookups. The languages with higher abstraction give you reusable, high performance options. The C programmer will need to either roll his own, which may not be an option if time Is limited, or choose a lower-performance alternative.

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