archives

Andrei's answer to "Which language has the brightest future in replacement of C between D, Go and Rust? And Why?"

Excellent critique of potential C/C++ successors (from the author of D, also top of /r/programming ATM):

https://www.quora.com/Which-language-has-the-brightest-future-in-replacement-of-C-between-D-Go-and-Rust-And-Why/answer/Andrei-Alexandrescu

Money quote:

A disharmonic personality. Reading any amount of Rust code evokes the joke "friends don't let friends skip leg day" and the comic imagery of men with hulky torsos resting on skinny legs. Rust puts safe, precise memory management front and center of everything. Unfortunately, that's seldom the problem domain, which means a large fraction of the thinking and coding are dedicated to essentially a clerical job (which GC languages actually automate out of sight). Safe, deterministic memory reclamation is a hard problem, but is not the only problem or even the most important problem in a program.

Rumors in Complexity Theory

I imagine everybody already has read this, and that there's nothing to discuss really. Nothing to do but wait, but I think it should be an LtU post anyway.

For days, rumors about the biggest advance in years in so-called complexity theory have been lighting up the Internet. That’s only fitting, as the breakthrough involves comparing networks just like researchers’ webs of online connections. László Babai, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has developed a mathematical recipe or "algorithm" that supposedly can take two networks—no matter how big and tangled—and tell whether they are, in fact, the same, in far fewer steps than the previous best algorithm.

From Science Magazine.