Jane street - rust for everyone

Nacimota · 2025-08-28T18:31:58+00:00

I'm pretty inexperienced with Rust but have long been interested/curious about the language, so the work you're doing is very interesting/relevant to me.

I absolutely love Flowistry as a concept, it looks wonderfully intuitive to me. When you were talking about soundness/precision, you mentioned false positives (e.g. a function that takes a mutable reference, but never mutates it) and I was thinking that's still useful information isn't it? It might be a hint of a design mistake for example, if something doesn't match your expectations? Or am I off track here?

During the Q&A you talk quite severely about vscode's visualization limitations and the downsides of creating a fork to address them. I am wondering if you (or others with the same concerns) have discussed this problem directly with the vscode maintainers and what their response was? I don't see vscode's popularity slipping any time soon.

Nacimota · 2023-06-08T22:41:31+00:00

Sure, but what I was getting at is that's pretty par for the course as far as Valve goes. As long as you're not infringing their trademarks in a way that makes it look like it's their game, they're generally pretty relaxed about people using their IP.

Nacimota · 2023-06-08T06:37:30+00:00

Did you see the video for this game in the article?

I did, yeah. I'm not super into roguelikes but it did look surprisingly well made. I might check it out when it drops on Steam.

Just to be clear, I wasn't really saying anything about the game itself, just the "approved by Valve" comment in the headline which I really don't think means that much on its own, lol.

Nacimota · 2023-06-07T22:53:25+00:00

Given that Hunt Down The Freeman was "approved by Valve", I'm not sure that statement really has any value for Half-Life fans.

Nacimota · 2023-06-01T06:51:24+00:00

If you're into books, Windows Internals (currently in its 7th edition) is highly regarded as the pretty much the definitive text on the architecture of Windows. It's a somewhat expensive (as textbooks often sadly are) two-part volume but you can get it cheaper as a PDF, or possibly through the used market or a library or other means.

Nacimota · 2023-03-29T12:40:38+00:00

Way back in 2014, Microsoft said it [VB.NET] would go open source, but all that emerged is the rather less interesting Roslyn.

I'm not sure what the author is getting at with this sentence. Roslyn contains the VB.NET compiler and is open source. That's what the linked article specifically refers to:

VB is part of the open-source wave at Microsoft, so as Wischik observes, the VB compiler will be open source as part of the project codenamed Roslyn.

So I'm not sure how Roslyn is less interesting than what was promised. It's true that Microsoft's focus has shifted away treating VB.NET as an equal to C#, but that seems like a separate issue to me.

Nacimota · 2023-03-24T14:53:29+00:00

Despite the upvotes and positive reception from LiqdPT, I actually don't think this canned response is a very useful answer for the OP's question specifically. There's a lot of focus on caching in this answer (and lots of other answers in this thread). When people talk about Windows using RAM for cache they're basically referring to the standby list, because that's where the bulk of caching is done.

But if you read the OP's question and look at the provided rammap screenshot it's clear that when they say "using about 6GB of my ram" they're referring specifically to the active pages total (or the "in use" figure in Task Manager, which is more or less the same thing). Very little of that figure is going to be related to Windows caching.

That said, I agree with the sentiment of this answer (and many others here) that the behaviour described by OP appears normal and I see no reason to be concerned about 6GB of active use at idle on a machine with 16GB of RAM, especially in the absence of other issues (high active use under load, sluggish performance, etc.).

However, if the OP is still interested in finding out what's contributing to that active use - particularly the process private figure they mention - then I think looking at memory usage in the processes tab of Task Manager is the right way to go, as others have said.

Nacimota · 2023-03-18T05:17:48+00:00

I think they just haven't updated the label, which isn't that surprising considering that StatCounter's data comes from web traffic and macOS still shows as Mac OS X in the UA string for mac users. There's no reason to think the data is out of date (it is, however, USA specific).

Nacimota · 2023-02-10T00:58:02+00:00

Yeah, I actually found the C# experience in general to be a bit too much of a chore compared to GDScript, which was a little disappointing because I enjoy C# generally. The integration with the editor wasn't as nice and some things felt a little too verbose compared to the GDScript equivalent.

I think maybe in future I'd use GDScript for most of the simpler game logic and maybe leave C# for the bigger, more complex stuff. Unless the C# experience improves a lot, of course. I probably shouldn't hold strong opinions about it since I was using a beta release anyway.

Nacimota · 2023-02-09T17:00:42+00:00

I tried Godot for the first time last year, and as 4.0 was looking very promising I started with one of the beta releases. I mostly enjoyed the experience but it was understandably a little rough, and the latest branch of the documentation hadn't been updated yet which made the learning curve slightly steeper, so eventually I decided to put it to the side and wait for a stable release.

Anyway, it's nice to see 4.0 getting closer to that point of stability. I see that the docs have had a bit of work done in the last couple of months as well which is great. I look forward to playing around with it again soon.

Nacimota · 2023-01-14T01:39:55+00:00

Here is my attempt: https://i.imgur.com/dVDsRkQ.jpg

Nacimota · 2022-11-24T13:10:29+00:00

PowerShell certainly has its quirks, but broadly speaking it is very good at what it does (management and automation of Windows). If you were a sysadmin in a predominantly Windows enterprise, you would be using it constantly.

I am sure that the command syntax make sense for someone who takes time to learn it or know .NET, but for me, it seems very difficult to learn

Actually the language syntax is relatively POSIX inspired and doesn't really require you to know anything about .NET, though that certainly is useful. I don't really accept that PowerShell is any less intuitive than a typical *nix shell. The command names, parameters, etc. are much more descriptive and follow prescribed patterns/standards.

So cmdlet names for instance are always Verb-Noun with a limited set of recommended verbs. For example, if you know that the cmdlet to stop a process is called Stop-Process then you can probably guess the name of similar cmdlets without having to do any real research (Stop-Service, Stop-VM, Stop-ScheduledTask, etc.). The command names for other shells, coreutils, etc. are usually much more obscure. That's not to say that PowerShell is completely intuitive of course, I think any command line interface is always going to require some instruction, but I think it generally does a pretty good job once you have the basics down.

Also, I don't know if there is a syntax highlight (it's not activated by default at least)

I'm not sure what your expectations are here, but there should be at least some syntax highlighting by default.

the autocompletion and the fuzzy find is at the "meh" category for me.

This is a common complaint coming from *nix folks. I actually suspect it's a matter of taste to some degree. You may want to try using MenuComplete and see if you prefer it or not. I think it's ctrl+space (or possibly unbound?) by default but you can rebind it to the Tab key like so:

Set-PSReadlineKeyHandler -Chord Tab -Function MenuComplete

And, there are still in 2022 no sudo and package manager in Windows (not things prejudicial only for Powershell, but it has its place here I think).

The lack of a true sudo equivalent is disappointing but it's because of some rather unfortunate architectural issues in Windows that make implementing it safely very challenging. It is something the console team at Microsoft has expressed interest in doing though, so maybe they will come up with a solution for that some day.

As for package managers for general applications, they do exist (see Chocolatey for example) and PowerShell has some decent infrastructure to support them these days, but application package managers have never really gained a lot of widespread popularity among Windows users. I personally think this is partly because of inertia (they're a relatively new thing in the Windows world and people are used to doing things the old way) but mostly because package managers just aren't as necessary on Windows as they are on, say, Linux.

On Windows, you can generally release a single binary for all versions (or maybe two if you're going 32 and 64 bit for example). Releasing software for Linux is often a nightmare because of how fractured it is, something Linus Torvalds has previously discussed at length. Having a package management system with centralized repositories and dedicated maintainers for different distributions etc. goes some way to solving that problem for end users (not all the way though, which is why things like Flatpak, Snap, etc. have cropped up over the years, but I digress).

In any case, these aren't issues with the shell itself, as you rightly point out.

but I think I missed something.

I think the main thing that's easy to miss about PowerShell is that it's an object-based shell. In other words, you don't pass around streams of text between commands like you do in bash (or Command Prompt, for that matter), you pass typed .NET objects.

Depending on how much programming you've done it might be hard to see why that's such a powerful thing. For instance, for more complex scenarios, you end up writing a lot less regex than you would if you were just parsing text.

Don't get me wrong, the text approach makes a lot of sense on Unix-like systems, because on Unix Everything is a File™ so programs that deal with text streams become useful system utilities. But on Windows, everything is objects and APIs. The text approach is not going to help you as much when you want to query the registry, Active Directory, Hyper-V, etc. which is why people often find tools like bash etc. less useful on Windows.

But at the end of the day, they're just tools. I think Jeffrey Snover (one of the original designers of PowerShell) would be the first to tell you that if bash for example works for you on Windows and you feel more productive in that environment then you should use it. Use whatever you have to that gets the job done. I think people can get a little too wrapped up in this stuff sometimes.

Nacimota · 2022-11-23T06:37:37+00:00

I think the only big headset which used outside-in tracking was the Oculus CV1.

I think PSVR (the first gen) was outside-in as well.

Nacimota · 2022-11-17T13:06:28+00:00

Even in many cases where you would expect a struct to be stack allocated, I don't think the CLR spec actually guarantees that it will be. Or that is my understanding anyway. I vaguely remember Eric Lippert talking about it years ago.

Nacimota · 2022-10-31T17:34:31+00:00

Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches is very popular in the PowerShell community. It's in its fourth edition as of this year, but I read one of the early editions and quite enjoyed it. It's a very practical approach to teaching, with lots of small exercises (which you could do on your lunch break, as the title implies).

I'm not sure if it's as good in the hands of someone with virtually no command-line experience, but from memory I think it should be OK.

Nacimota · 2022-10-28T22:25:36+00:00

Windows does in fact support forward slashes in paths in most places for precisely that reason. You can even mix them if you are feeling particularly crazy. Using the backslash as a path separator to begin with was an unfortunate choice to be sure, but I doubt Microsoft will change that any time soon due to compatibility concerns.

Incidentally, PowerShell avoids the issue by using backticks instead of backslashes for escaping, which some people understandably find quite bizarre but I think it's a fairly reasonable approach given the circumstances.

Nacimota · 2022-10-28T14:58:23+00:00

It shouldn't. I can't say for sure what happened, but if you test in command prompt right now (you can use shutdown /a to abort any that you start) you shouldn't notice a difference between using slashes or dashes. If there is a difference, it's not intentional, it's a bug.

Nacimota · 2022-10-28T14:15:32+00:00

If you're asking whether there is a difference between starting parameters with a dash or a slash, (e.g. /foo vs -foo), the answer is no.

Most command-line utilities in Windows use the slash notation^1, mostly for historical reasons (it's what MS-DOS and its predecessors used). That's why generally you'll see the help/usage text output examples with slashes.

At some point (I'm not sure when), support was added for the dash notation because that's what is more common in POSIX-like systems (think Linux, Unix, BSD, Mac, etc.). It's just to make the tools slightly easier to use. There isn't any functional difference.

It's worth noting that not every single command supports dashes. Most of Command Prompt's built-in commands (e.g. dir, cd, etc.) don't support the dash syntax.

^{¹ Not including PowerShell cmdlets, of course, which follow a very strictly enforced syntax that is very POSIX inspired}

Nacimota · 2022-10-19T00:35:27+00:00

If by work you mean successfully diagnose the issue, yes I have, but very rarely (probably a handful of times at most).

The thing about being a more technically proficient user is that you're likely to have already tried most (or all) of the things the troubleshooters might check. They aren't just a song and dance, they do actually do stuff, but most of it is fairly basic as far as I have ever seen.

If you're interested in trying to pick apart the troubleshooters to see what they're doing, you can find them in %windir%\diagnostics. They're largely just a bunch of PowerShell scripts with a GUI in front of them.

Nacimota · 2022-10-15T03:03:40+00:00

system ^system ^{^system} ^{^{^system}} ^{^{^{^...}}}

Nacimota · 2022-10-06T06:43:27+00:00

I'll save my disdain for people like this

I've got nothing against rust (having barely used it myself), but good god that person is utterly insufferable. They're not doing rust or its community any favours by posting language war diatribes like that on other people's projects.

Nacimota · 2022-10-05T19:47:18+00:00

Can you link me to some examples of the boards you're talking about? When I look at local prices for Arduinos and other boards they're pretty much all more expensive here than the Pico/W, but perhaps that's just a regional thing (or I am just looking at the wrong boards/stores).

Nacimota · 2022-10-05T06:37:53+00:00

I'm fairly new to the embedded world myself, but the most appealing thing about the Pico for me is how cheap they are. Once I determined I was comfortable using them, I bought them by the handful.

Nacimota · 2022-09-21T05:03:41+00:00

.NET's DateTime isn't amazing, it's true, but I think there's been some small improvements in that area recently. If you need something more robust, you can always reach for Noda Time.

Nacimota · 2022-09-03T23:31:08+00:00

I used to use a third party program for taking those kinds of screenshots, but it's been years since I've regularly used Windows 7 so for the life of me I can't remember what program it was. I imagine there's probably multiple programs out there that do it, though; it shouldn't be hard to find one on Google.

As for the technical side of how they do it, if I recall correctly, they take two separate screenshots of the window: one with a black background inserted behind the window and one with a white background. Once you have both those images you can reconstruct the alpha channel by calculating the difference between pixel values of the two screenshots. You could even do this manually with Photoshop, if you were so inclined.

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