Ian Denhardt

Freelance software dev & FOSS person. I hack on @SandstormIO. I don't actually use twitter anymore, see

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano for a while now there's a hybrid design that's been floating around in my head: trad copying gc for young gens, then flip to recounting for old gens, when the generational hypothesis starts to fall apart. Key idea: twiddle the refcounts at promotion time.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano I agree, but also ownership and borrowing is useful for resources other than memory.

Tbh if perf weren't a consideration I'd say refcount everything, since it would make finalizers way more useful, often moreso than cyclic data types.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano (note that because you only need to traverse new objects, any savings beyond would be constant factors on the O(n) you paid to build the structure. My guess is that crypto hashing is slower than diffing)

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano hm, unless it's a cryptographic hash you still need to check equality in case of collisions. https://t.co/BEXHd9M9M2 lets you short circuit on pointer identity, so any savings you'd get would be from not traversing *new* objects, and I bet that's cheaper than crypto anyway.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

The @SandstormIO community is participating in @_FundOSS, and we'd love your support. Their quadratic funding model means small donations can get a *big* boost from the matching fund, so every bit counts! https://t.co/O04vkhBDjd

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano for types like finger trees with a semantically implied representation, this makes sense, but if it's more abstract (e.g. maps) I think maintaining an interface boundary is useful. Being able to reason about what code can and can't depend on is a huge maintainability boon.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano relevant: https://t.co/ZthkeLzWkb

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

I wrote a couple #haskell libraries (better posix api bindings and more flexible resource management) while working on backup stuff related to @SandstormIO. Blog post:
https://t.co/QmUCmHmZh7

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano when I was first putting together haskell-capnp's rpc later, I wrote a tiny library that may be apropos:
https://t.co/C6oRcRr70O

It gives you a bit of the best of both worlds: you can spawn tasks in an unstructured way, but still get an upper bound on their collective lifetimes

[James Young @JamesYoungKY]

Hello, my name is James. I'm a fmr Elections Admin of a large urban county, am registered @GOP, and actively work with hundreds of jurisdictions across the US. For many reasons, the past week has been difficult. If you seek truth about US elections, please keep reading.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@seagreen__ @saurabhnanda yeah, a unified client ala pidgin would be nice (and probably more tractable), but I don't know of anything good.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@seagreen__ @saurabhnanda fwiw, matrix has bridges to a lot of things.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@seagreen__ @saurabhnanda I'm having a lot of dejavu from 15 years ago, when we had the same problem with instant messaging.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@seagreen__ A couple of times in my career I've made modifications to a tool I'd written and hadn't looked at in years. I'm always grateful to past-me for actually documenting things; the knowledge is definitely still in there somewhere, but those comments are really key to jog my memory.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@alexelcu @pchiusano I've grown to find bizarre, completely irrelevant ads comforting, as it shows me the tracking isn't working that well...

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@seagreen__ @runarorama yeah, it doesn't do Haskell -> capnp currently, though there's an open issue:
https://t.co/gKZHXASqQl

Contributions welcome!

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@qntm @seagreen__ leave them both, get out with your life, and reevaluate the life choices you made that left you without an off-site backup (even a dev's local checkout on their laptop).

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano what scares me here is not "excel tries to be clever with dates" so much as "scientists are using excel for this!?!?" No software engineer would think that was a good idea. What we need to think about is why we're failing to get scientists using appropriate tools.

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@pchiusano frankly this reads to me less as a case of the software industry being a house of cards, and more how do we bridge the gap between friendly, easy to use tools and ones suitable for more "serious" work?

[Ian Denhardt @zenhack_net]

@seagreen__ what I want is not really an IDE so much as tooling for easily scriptable transformations on source code. I'd be happy typing 'rename Old.Module.Path New.Path' at a terminal; it doesn't need to impose an editor on me to achieve that.