jloveless
Joined 9 years ago
Karma
188
Submissions
90
Member since
Mar 23
co-founder @ edgemesh.com
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Comment · 3 months ago
We’ve used versions of L in production for approaching year 10
Comment · 3 months ago
More niche than many yes - but there’s something about learning an array language that changes how you look at programming in general. And for the better. Of course, the places where these things are used are generally very well paying positions. They tend to be areas with a very high amount of data that is incredibly valuable.
Comment · 3 months ago
intentional. I consider kdb/kdb+ to be understood as the KX products - but L runs the same database style functionality (the qSQL is essentially just sugar atop the q/k code. Most of which is written in k [or C in L for a number of components])
Comment · 3 months ago
I’d encourage running the master bench yourself! Super easy
https://github.com/l-labs/master-benchmark
Or on the database side of the house try the h2o.ai base that duckdb excels at
Comment · 3 months ago
Even deeper is the full test suite ala
https://github.com/l-labs/rust_ipc/blob/master/tests/ipc_tes...
Which is ~6k tests (Rust is actually what I use to drive release testing)
Comment · 3 months ago
For QC this is a pretty solid tester (run on L or other compatible runtime) - focused on performance as it pushes multiple edges.
https://github.com/l-labs/master-benchmark
Which can also be run with minimal modifications on ngn and others.
For database the h2o.ai for duckDB really is a solid hard bench IMHO:
Comment · 3 months ago
fair point. I am not a front end designer and I did want something less spartan than proverbial q.txt [1] .
To be honest - many folks in the community have had access for some time , and a website was just put up this week as a 'larger community access'.
That said the mail group has more details and the blog posts are effectively internal posts turned into shorter (less code) versions. The binary itself is years of effort - with small improvements over many years and shaving a few kb each time ... 'built the old way' like amish furniture :)
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20160306154854/http://kx.com/q/d...
Comment · 3 months ago
relative to CPU speed ... no. see [1][2].
the early versions of L (circa ... 2011/2012) couldn't really deliver any substantial performance improvement over what is out there (BQN/ngn/Kona). The memory bandwidth was the limit - I simply couldn't keep the cores active. ~2018/2019 I started from scratch with arrays (vectors) using compression by default. That was a massive unlock - and I could not keep most of the CPU doing actual compute! Then it was years of working on compression native operations - some of which were obvious[3] like sum/reductions ... others not so much!
[1] https://www.emergentmind.com/topics/memory-wall [2] https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~rijurekha/col216/quantitative_ap... [3] https://lv1.sh/blog/compute-on-compressed/
Comment · 3 months ago
Definitely not a vibe coded language - I really wish the ai models were more helpful - but I should do a write up of the assembly analysis (and asm2vec). ATW is working on even more impressive things at the moment! Well beyond the scope of an interpreter itself.
Comment · 3 months ago
KlongPy and KlongPy + duckDB are wonderful. GREAT job. I think there's a whole world of backprop / ML work that can be done in that style! Given the heritage not surprising that most Klong code is ~= L in k mode! Same with ngn/k . E.g. sigmoid is almost the same (:: for assign in klongpy , : for l/q/k). The autograd work is great!
Comment · 3 months ago
Sorry about that. Basically you can now write and run code in the K/q/or qsql languages on your laptop for free. For a very long time (20 years+) this language has not been accessible to most - it’s almost exclusively used on Wall Street and has a very high price barrier to entry. Q programmers are still some of the most highly paid engineers consistently - as the workforce is small and the use cases are (generally) extremely lucrative. If you are a programmer wondering what comes next… q might be for you. Over the decades I’ve taught a few dozen people Q- and I’m happy to say they’ve gone on to have wonderful and stable careers in high paying jobs with deep stability. Mostly hedge funds and banks (and exchanges).
It’s a wonderful and often times world changing language and now you can play with it yourself.
It’s also very very fast. As a database it’s still insanely great for many usecases.
Comment · 3 months ago
duckdb is great and its h2o.ai benchmark was difficult to beat!
Comment · 3 months ago
there's one in the footer and agree.
Comment · 3 months ago
Unfortunately the code itself is in a style of C many find difficult to read. I blame my upbringing. ATW open sourced examples and it was not really helpful. More recently others are doing a step by step in more standard C https://github.com/ardentsia-cgs/kparser/
Comment · 3 months ago
there's even a secret -17!`name that will show the details.
e.g.
//100k random 32b ints ...
l>v:100000?255
l>v
196 124 18 216 63 169 151 173 126 99 90 133 92 158 217 169 201 191 138 105 13..
// but actually they are 1/4 the size e.g. int8
l>-17!`v
1b // is compressed?
100032j // compressed bytes
400000j // original bytes