Raphael_Amiard
Joined 17 years ago
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409
Member since
Mar 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 months ago
Comment · 4 months ago
Average american is what you mean
Comment · 5 months ago
It’s pattern matching. A big part of reasoning for sure, but not reasoning per se
Comment · 6 months ago
"Is this true for the Ada lang/compiler"
Yes, Ada has a lot of the same kind of fractal complexity that C++ has, which derives from unforeseen interaction of some features with some other.
On top of that, as I said in another comment, features are extremely overspecified. The standard specifies what has to be done in every edge case, often with a specification that is not very practical to implement efficiently
Comment · 6 months ago
You're right in your first part. Ada 83 is less complex than modern C++ or Rust. However Ada kept evolving, and a lot of complexity was added in later revisions, such as Ada 95, which added a kind of bastardized and very complex Java style object model layer.
Ada features that are hard to compile are very common in the language. It is generally a language that is hard to compile to efficient code, because rules were conceived in an abstract notion of what safety is. But in general Ada is an extremely over specified language, which leaves very little space to interpretation. You can check the Ada reference manual if you want, which is a use 1000 pages book (http://www.ada-auth.org/arm.html)
* Array types are very powerful and very complicated * Tasking & threading are specified in the language, which seems good on paper, but the abstractions are not very efficient and of tremendous complexity to implement. * Ada's generic model is very hard to compile efficiently. It was designed in a way that tried to make it possible to compile down both to a "shared implementation" approach, as well as down to a monomorphized approach. Mistakes were done down the line wrt the specification of generics which made compiling them to shared generics almost impossible, which is why some compiler vendors didn't support some features of the language at all. * Ada scoping & module system is of immense complexity * The type system is very vast. Ada's name & type resolution algorithm is extremely complex to implement. functions can be overloaded on both parameters & return types, and there is a enclosing context that determines which overloads will be used in the end. On top of that you have preferences rules for some functions & types, subtyping, derived types, etc ...
This is just what comes to mind on a late Friday evening :) I would say that the language is so complex that writing a new compiler is one of those herculean efforts that reach similar heights as writing a new C++ compiler. That's just a fe
Comment · 6 months ago
> Today, the criticism about complexity seems naive, because many later languages have become much more complex than Ada
I don’t think you really understand what you’re saying here. I have worked on an ada compiler for the best part of a decade. It’s one of the most complex languages there is, up there with C++ and C#, and probably rust
Comment · 6 months ago
There is none as far as affine types go, even is there is a parallel to be made with limited types, but they don’t serve the same purpose.
The way Ada generally solves the same problem is by allowing much more in terms of what you can give a stack lifetime to, return from a function, and pass by parameters to functions.
It also has the regular « smart pointer » mechanisms that C++ and Rust also have, also with relatively crappy ergonomics
Comment · 7 months ago
The very obvious flaw with that argument is that flying is defined by, you know, moving in the air, whereas intelligence tends to be defined with the baseline of human intelligence. You can invent a new meaning, but it seems kind of dishonest
Comment · 1 year ago
I love systems programming language and have worked on the Ada language for a long time. I find Zig to be incredibly underwhelming. Absolutely nothing about it is new or novel, the closest being comptime which is not actually new.
Also highly subjective but the syntax hurts my eyes.
So I’m kind of interested by an answer to the question this articles fails to answer. Why do you guys find Zig so cool ?
Comment · 1 year ago
Came here to say that. It’s important to remember how biased hacker news is in that regard. I’m just out of ten years in the safety critical market, and I can assure you that our clients are still a long way from being able to use those. I myself work in low level/runtime/compilers, and the output from AIs is often too erratic to be useful
Comment · 4 years ago
SPARK allows you to formally prove that your code is correct according to a given specification. It can thus provides much stronger guarantees than what Rust would be able to provide.
Similar technology exists for Rust, but it is much less advanced than SPARK is (https://github.com/xldenis/creusot)
Comment · 4 years ago
This is about firmware, nothing to do with the performance of GPUs...
Comment · 4 years ago
Not defending Russia in general, or in particular russian government. As a French person whose national medias are completely taken over by multinationals (source https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/cartes/PPA), not only the ban was a bit laughable in terms of banning propaganda, but also RT France's perspective and journalism was refreshing. It was presenting a skewed version of the world, but if you believe as I do that we won't attain information via objectivity, which is a nebulous concept anyway, but via plurality, RT France's disappearance is a net loss for the French media landscape, and I'm a bit alarmed at the black&whiteness of views I see here and in other places.
Comment · 4 years ago
> For verification in general, is the expense of verification in this case because of the model needed to verify Ada? For instance, perhaps a language that makes different choices might have a model checker that could scale better.
I don't think so. The SPARK subset has been chosen to aid verification. The problem of proof is inherently computationally hard, and the most gains you can expect will come from advances in solver technology, both algorithmic and in terms of scaling to multiple cores or GPU eventually.
Just my opinion :) But I work at AdaCore (not on SPARK) so have some familiarity with the subject.
« The pull request alone adds over 197 thousand lines of code across 1,816 files. »
I noticed that both Claude and GPT are fond of those kind of stupid accounting statements that don’t mean a lot in and of themselves, but look impressive in a « wow numbers » way. Which is kind of ironic since counting remains one of their weak points