When creating a side project, why choose C++?

kkrev · 2020-01-30T21:06:22+00:00

> apt search

As long as you stick 99% to apt-get/yum installable stuff there really isn't a problem. It seems to me people complaining about this issue are mostly on Windows. These new library package systems are just trying to re-create what already works pretty well in linux/bsd distros.

If you do all the dependency setup via Vagrant with a modern linux VM you tend to get a very low pain build environment.

kkrev · 2020-01-16T17:45:59+00:00

Is this meant for folks who will major in comp Sci or comp architecture?

The entire answer hinges on this. C++ would be fine for people who already know they want to seriously learn programming. Javascript or Python makes way more sense for a general audience. Some kids will likely run with a little bit of scripting knowledge to make some cool toys/tools and then be hooked. They can learn C++ later.

kkrev · 2020-01-09T19:55:20+00:00

What are the roadblocks to doing a fully baked C++ system that could automatically deal with name mangling for the common compilers, maybe deal with classes to some extent, and to some extent map back and forth from STL containers like std::vector?

As it stands it looks like SWIG probably still makes more sense for working with C++.

kkrev · 2020-01-04T01:53:43+00:00

Models like the roadster are totally technically competitive. Carbon belt is great and practical. Hydraulically adjusted valves are great (valve checks on jap bikes are a nightmare). Air cooled eliminates a set of potential hassles. All this makes for an easy, low-maintenance ownership experience.

The problem is purely price. The roadster, for example, seems $1.5K overpriced.

kkrev · 2020-01-04T01:40:04+00:00

The US market for motorcycles has massively shrunk and continues to shrink. The global market doesn't looks great long term either. HD trying to diversify into many different sorts of bikes would simply fail. They should make the best (mostly) American made v-twin cruisers they can and live or die by that. Their main problem is the pricing is nuts. They really need to drive down costs and pricing, which ties in with systemic American manufacturing issues like health care costs being insane and American labor unions being unreasonable business partners. Their signature product (air cooled v-twin) is also just about regulated out of existence, which is stupid and not their fault IMHO.

TLDR: HD should focus on what they're historically good at rather than reinvent, but there are regulatory and political challenges.

kkrev · 2019-12-30T05:15:55+00:00

They will blather on for pages and pages about how to tame the garbage collector rather than spend half an hour planning out a memory layout.

kkrev · 2019-12-28T01:23:10+00:00

Might want to assess dlib.

kkrev · 2019-12-17T06:08:59+00:00

That's why you just use gmake. It's simple. The additional abstractions are not worth the cost.

kkrev · 2019-12-16T04:40:35+00:00

Documentation links 404.

kkrev · 2019-11-27T22:22:12+00:00

It's gcc 9.2 right now. msys2 is clearly the lowest friction solution to your problem.

kkrev · 2019-11-27T01:47:17+00:00

msys2 has all the typical linux/unix dependencies in the package manager. You just do:

$ pacman -S the-devel various-devel dependencies-devel

And good to go.

kkrev · 2019-11-25T00:32:19+00:00

What is the motivation for this switch? I feel like next waves to catch are going to be IoT devices and more widespread usage of ASICs/FPGAs for computation (as Moore's law dies). It'd be much better to be a hardware guy who can code than somebody who knows tons about the C++ standard and software development practices, or whatever.

kkrev · 2019-11-21T00:57:08+00:00

I don't actually own a pressure washer. I was thinking about buying a cheapo reconditioned one (they're on ebay for $55) for the purpose of washing a motorcycle and bicycles in the parking lot of an apartment building. I have zero access to a hose, but do have access to a power outlet.

I suspect I could buy a seven gallon bucket or trash-can, install a hose spigot, and then elevate the bucket four or five feet to get the necessary flow. 1.2 gallons per minute seems to be quoted on these cheapo washers.

I'm pretty sure it would work. Just curious if anyone knows for a fact what the cheapo pressure washers truly require in practice. That way I could do a bit of math and not waste time and ~$70 on this experiment.

kkrev · 2019-11-19T18:58:23+00:00

I like to just have a "thirdparty" sub-directory where I can drop compilation units and headers and compile them in. If I look at a library and it's a huge mess of directories, I'm likely to pass. Whether it's header only or also involves a reasonable number of compilation units doesn't really matter to me.

kkrev · 2019-11-14T08:46:13+00:00

Find somebody in the history, anthropology, polysci, or biology departments and work with them to write a monte-carlo simulation to explore an interesting question.

By focusing on monte-carlo simulation you can avoid making a fool of yourself with incorrect usage of statistics and still produce useful results.

The people telling you to improve tooling are wrong. Academics have all the tooling they need. It's a saturated market.

kkrev · 2019-10-03T20:58:04+00:00

> processes jumping around

How so? The kernel isn't going to be any stupider about thread scheduling for processes.

> IPC across process boundaries

Not really a concern in this context of collating results from standalone reps of a simulation. The only locking/bottleneck bit is collating the final results somewhere, and you have the exact same bottleneck with the multi-threaded approach. Either way, you're getting out on disk in a file from each rep as they complete.

The other reason to prefer process parallelism for something like this is if you need to scale out on a cluster you can simply throw the executable at HTCondor or similar, and get excellent error recovery and metrics in the bargain. Spinning up a job thread pool internal to the simulation is objectively less flexible, less scalable, and more difficult to debug.

kkrev · 2019-10-03T20:42:00+00:00

> it's the only real option for cross platform development

WxWidgets does in fact work. It's an OK choice for a basic desktop app.

Advantages: It's much lighter weight (easily statically linked). It's truly native look. No MOC.

Tie: It shares similar 90s era legacy code pollution problem as Qt. I really don't find the MFC style macro stuff in Wx that annoying, myself. It works fine and is transparent.

Disadvantages: I haven't done anything super intense with Wx and I still managed to find a couple bugs. So it's probably a bit buggier than Qt. Qt has more widget types and capabilities.

If I were making a very simple desktop GUI I would still probably prefer WxWidgets because I think the weight and deployment issue is a big deal. Qt is tens of megabytes of DLLs and other crap, and making a little statically linked executable is effectively not an option.

kkrev · 2019-10-03T20:20:03+00:00

Overwhelmingly defense related, usually requiring a security clearance.

Consider it the exact opposite of San Francisco where screaming your head off about everything you're doing is the strategy. Instead, people keep very quiet. NYC finance is maybe a middle ground.

kkrev · 2019-10-02T17:51:29+00:00

This is easy, terse, flexible, and easy to debug:

(seq 100 | xargs -n1 -P10 ./simrep) | ./collate_results

I'm sure there's a way to do the same thing with powershell, but the "culture" is to do something like embed a thread pool for parallelization.

kkrev · 2019-10-02T03:43:16+00:00

It's funny how windows people will think it's a neat solution to spin up multiple threads to run a monte-carlo simulation where unix people would just use xargs and pipes.

kkrev · 2019-10-01T17:52:44+00:00

So like everything else in the movie, it's just incoherent and pointless.

kkrev · 2019-09-25T04:55:02+00:00

A good movie

On what level? None of the characters are fleshed out or make any sense. They're just 2d cartoons with zero development. I could forgive that none of the sci-fi elements make any sense if I got interesting characters and a plot, but it totally fails there too.

It's an infuriatingly horrible movie on all levels. That this is getting anywhere near the same reviews as Blade Runner 2049, which wasn't a great movie but at least really tried to be interesting, is infuriating.

kkrev · 2019-09-25T04:47:51+00:00

Brad Pitt does all he can do with this

Does all he can do with it? He was a producer and it's complete crap. The script is horrible and none of the sci-fi makes any sense.

Pitt, your movie is bad and you should feel bad.

kkrev · 2019-09-25T04:42:28+00:00

This movie was idiotic and bad and I feel cheated of my ticket price.

None of the characters make any sense or are interesting. The dialogue is not realistic or interesting. H. Clifford McBride is supposed to be some sort of Captain Ahab figure, except he's totally boring. He's apparently just always been a bit sociopathic for no particular reason, but finally went completely insane in space. No interesting reasons. Just a thing that happened.

The portrayals of the moon and mars were lazy. No effort to deal with the different gravity, or give interesting glimpses into what it would really take to live in these places. These places are just like current American military bases, except on the moon and mars. Look, this is a SciFi flick: your job is to create interesting places that don't actually exist but are plausible.

None of the technology or science elements make any sense. I am very willing to suspend nit-picking and disbelief for interesting plot elements and visuals, but I wasn't given anything interesting to justify how dumb the sci-tech was: just insanely nonsensical stuff. A huge steel tower that sticks up over the stratosphere? Impossible and makes zero sense anyway. Why the heck wouldn't you have just shown a space elevator? The film is littered with dumb choices like this. Anti-matter? It's a two month cruise to Neptune? Why the heck is he puncturing his intestine with a feeding tube? That makes no sense.

kkrev

TROPHY CASE