nzentzis's comments

At least for the purposes of comparing to web apps, the criteria would be: responsive/low-latency (responds to input quickly), fast (completes tasks quickly), uses resources proportional to the functionality it provides, and doesn't often hang or spend noticeable amounts of time waiting for a network request before responding to an action.

Applications that meet these criteria include: Thunderbird, KiCAD, VLC, Vim, tmux, Blender, evince, Handbrake, and Pidgin.

I keep hearing the "web technologies are fine, you're just using them wrong" refrain over and over again, but it's ultimately not very convincing. If it's true, then where are all the good web applications? I've certainly never seen any of them. Can you give an example?

If nobody can get Web technologies to deliver a good experience, then I'm not sure it matters that much whether or not it's possible in theory. Delivering a theoretically great user experience won't get you anywhere unless it also translates to practice.

My main problem with it is limited software support. Xmonad isn't available and as far as I can tell what support exists for screen recording and screenshots is half-baked at best. I haven't seen anywhere near enough problems with X11 to make switching window managers worth it, and the screen recording thing would be a massive pain to work around.

This doesn't apply if you want to run CUDA-dependent software. I've generally gone for Nvidia for my personal machine since Torch has behaved oddly on AMD cards in the past.

It's true that Nvidia doesn't support Wayland properly, but that's not really an issue in my opinion. Wayland still has its own problems that mean switching from X11 isn't viable yet.

I think I partially agree, but that it mainly depends on the audience. I've found that parsing and recursion appear in more areas than just compilers, to the point where it'd be relatively difficult to avoid them. Machine code generation and the underlying implementation of high-level primitives (closures, tail-call recursion, and the like) hasn't, at least in my experience, been "naturally-occurring" to the same extent.

In terms of creating a "learn compilers from scratch" resource, Crenshaw's approach is definitely better. The trade-off would be that it'd take longer to get past the "writing a recursive descent/LR parser" phase, and it might never get to higher-level language features at all depending on the input language you go with.

Currently I'm using a modified version of the after-dark[0] theme for Zola.

[0] https://www.getzola.org/themes/after-dark/

Generating 64-bit code would be simpler in many ways, but I decided not to go into it until the basic language features are put in place. The extent of the changes involved in switching to amd64 will help directly show why having an intermediate representation for the generated code would be valuable.

Besides, if you're looking for a high-performance Scheme that fully utilizes all available system resources, there are definitely better options available. :)