msvan's comments

msvan | 1 month ago | on: Xcode 26.3 – Developers can leverage coding agents directly in Xcode

One thing that would be genuinely useful would be the ability to integrate Claude with the Metal debugger somehow, to get automated analysis of GPU profiling. The .gputrace format is proprietary and cannot be easily analyzed, and it seems that the new "agentic coding" integration in Xcode also does nothing to expose this data to LLMs. Oh well.

msvan | 1 year ago | on: 12 Months of Mandarin

I kind of see myself from ten years ago in this blog post! I also obsessively studied Mandarin Chinese in my late teens for the sheer fun of it, before doing a math undergrad. I even wrote comments on Hacker News about it a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7622940.

At the time I had seemingly limitless motivation for grinding away on flashcards and other learning materials. My progress was strong and I passed the HSK6 after a year and a half or so of studying, which at the time was the highest level of certification offered. I think they changed the system since and added more levels beyond 6. You can do amazing things if you're dedicated!

Today my Chinese is absolutely unusable, and my views on China have soured to the extent that I don't really want to revive my old skills. My takeaway is that learning one of these languages, the CJK languages, Arabic, or similarly weird languages, is just too much effort and I don't think it's worth it. I clearly had a lot of excess energy at the time that I could've directed towards something better. Knowing Chinese is about as useful as juggling and you might as well get really good at juggling if you're bored. It'll save you a few thousand hours.

msvan | 1 year ago | on: Zb: An Early-Stage Build System

As a current Nix user, what I would really like is a statically typed language to define builds. Recreating Nix without addressing that feels like a missed opportunity.

msvan | 2 years ago | on: Why Async Rust?

I think the final remark about a hypothetical language, Rust-like but without all the low-level requirements, is important here. There is essentially no widely-adopted programming language out that feels like a modern ML with a good tooling situation. Until that happens, Rust will continue to awkwardly serve the audience of such a language while never truly being what they want it to be.

msvan | 3 years ago | on: Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS

Lots of negativity in here. I for one am excited about the prospect of an editor that is as responsive as I remember Sublime being back in the day, with the feature set I've come to expect from VS Code. An editor like this simply does not exist today, and betting on the Rust ecosystem is entirely the right choice for building something like this in 2023.

msvan | 3 years ago | on: 2023 State of Software Engineers [pdf]

You'd think there would be an arbitrage opportunity in paying more $$$ for London talent. Still surprises me that this hasn't happened after all these years of huge differences.

msvan | 3 years ago | on: Blessed.rs – An unofficial guide to the Rust ecosystem

From the slog Github repo:

> You might consider using tracing instead. It's been a while since slog was created and it served Rust community well all this time. It remains a stable, featureful and battle-tested library, used in many important projects.

> In last few years, another ecosystem for Rust was created with similar features and a very good support for debugging async code and already larger dev team and community.

> Please check tracing and see if it is more suitable for your use-case. It seems that it is already a go-to logging/tracing solution for Rust.

> Reasons you might want to stick with slog anyway:

> async support doesn't benefit you

> you consider mature, stable code & API a plus

> it has some features that tracing is missing

> great performance (I have NOT done any comparison, but slog's performance is very good).

msvan | 3 years ago | on: Introducing ReadySet

I've used both of the suggested methods under "Current standards for scaling out databases" so I see where this is coming from. But I peeked at the AWS reference architecture, and it places a Consul and ReadySet deployment in my environment for me to run and maintain. I feel like any sales pitch for this really needs to convince me that having these things in my environments is going to be worth the hassle in terms of milliseconds and dollars, as opposed to just using RDS read replicas and paying a bit more. Then again, I can see this being an obvious choice if you're growing very quickly or have tight latency requirements.

With that said, it looks like cool tech and I read Jon's Rust for Rustaceans which serves as a stamp of quality for this even if I haven't tried it yet!

msvan | 5 years ago | on: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

A lot of new technology eventually becomes boring technology, and this is because of adoption in companies exactly in the way the author is discouraging. When the new becomes boring, everyone gets to reap the benefits of the new tech.

The world of software rests on the hard work of others, whether it's open source maintainers spending their free time making libraries for peanuts, or it's people going through the pain of productionizing a new technology. Being in the boring technology club is in a sense also being in the freeloader club, never contributing back to the state of the art.

It's a good article. It makes us aware of the drive many have to use the new thing, and the negative consequences of following this drive blindly. But I'm also happy that people do it.

msvan | 5 years ago | on: A Complete Course of the Raku programming language

Over the years I have learned and dipped my toes in many programming languages, and I'd need some kind of reason to look into yet another language. What are Raku's main contributions to the programming language design space that I probably haven't seen elsewhere?

msvan | 5 years ago | on: Bevy 0.3: game engine built in Rust

It seems like there's a ton of interest in Bevy! You must be spending a lot of time discussing things, reviewing PRs, doing outreach and community building like here. Is there any time left for the hard feature work? Are there any core members apart from you?

(Don't burn out!)

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