The part of this that's the most interesting to me is the fact that it is worthwhile for the compiler to expend the effort looking for this optimization opportunity. I would expect (x << 2) & -4 to be a fairly rare pattern, and even then removing the & -4 only saves one or two assembly instructions.
One day I want to build something like this, except for sound. It would be great to get a heading and distance for where a sound is coming from.
This could be both for small scale things (e.g. which part of this is squeaking?) or large scale (e.g. is that booming noise coming from the construction a few blocks away?)
I wonder if it would ever start to make sense to burn an AI model into ROM, replacing a large portion of an inference machine's RAM with ROM. (Probably not, since I'm sure those machines do dual-duty and run training when the inference workload slows down)
I also wish there was a book that guided you through the process of implementing a language with accurate garbage collection, similar to how Crafting Interpreters teaches you to implement a language. Perhaps it could start with a shadow stack + simple mark-and-sweep and then move on to stack maps + generational GC.
I bet if you took one of Taalas' cards which consumes 200 watts for 14,000 tokens/second [0] and slowed it down by a factor of 10, it would actually be quite reasonable to power by bicycle.
I've been going through Nora Sandler's Writing a C Compiler book and writing a compiler in Python. I'm excited to start the chapters on optimization - those seem like the most fun algorithm problems.
I recommend the book. It certainly isn't easy (maybe 3x harder than Crafting Interpreters), but I've learned a ton (eg how to deal with operations on different sizes of types, or the trick of using pseudoregisters to avoid having to figure out registers up front).
I'd be very curious to know what class of vulnerability these tend to be (buffer overrun, use after free, misset execute permissions?), and if, armed with that knowledge, a deterministic tool could reliably find or prevent all such vulnerabilities. Can linters find these? Perhaps fuzzing? If code was written in a more modern language, is it sill likely that these bugs would have happened?
> a luxury apartment building goes up, surveys the market, and sets its rents 30% higher for the privilege of living in a new building with a gym for dogs or ball pit or whatever. Then the older buildings say, "Well, we can raise our rents 20% and still be the best deal in town," and so on.
I think that might not be the right cause and effect relationship. The actual cause is increased demand. This creates both the increased pricing of existing stock and an incentive to build new stock.
Back when I lived in SF, there was one bus route (the 6, I believe) that I could use to get to work. The bus was so slow due to frequent, long stops and traffic lights that I could keep up with it on foot by walking briskly. I only bothered taking it when it was raining because it didn't get me to work any faster than walking.
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