seivadmas

What happened with that guy? Did he ever come back?

  Rust is a unique language in that it deallocates memory on the heap
  without requiring the writer to call free,
  while at the same time having no need for a garbage collector.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong but surely this is not unique - don't Objective C and Swift have automatic reference counting which accomplishes much the same thing?

Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean you SHOULD.

Metaprogramming has a place in Ruby but for the examples in the article there are far more readable ways to implement it.

Readability > cleverness every single time.

Important to note that this isn't STATIC typing (which detects errors at compile-time), rather this is more like a validation library to make sure structures have certain properties at run-time.

Not saying it isn't useful, in fact I have a project in which this would be a very good fit and I might even implement it there.

If you are writing Ruby you already decided you didn't care about speed.

Don't get me wrong, I think Ruby is a great language and I use it every day to get paid, but it is not a speed queen. Ruby's strengths lie in flexibility, fast iteration, readable code and permitting a functional style.

In most practical web applications the big bottlenecks will be either view rendering or database. Choosing to put any focus at all on performance of something like parallel vs serial assignment (unless you are doing something truly pathological) is a complete waste of time.

It will have no noticeable difference to the end user and distracts from the far more important job of making your code modular, extensible and readable.

If need your code to be fast and you are running Ruby, you already lost. Use Java or a compiled language instead.

Actually it does make a practical difference but I would argue in favor of the electric razor.

Ever wonder why it itches in those first couple of weeks if you decide to grow your beard out?

Look at that picture.

Shaving with a straight-blade razor basically leaves a bunch of tiny little hypodermic needles behind. When those suckers start growing out, they curl back into your face and start jabbing you, resulting in that annoying itching sensation.

If you want to grow your beard out, take my advice and make your last shave with an electric razor, it's a lot more comfortable.

Or press cmd-up to go up a dir.

I haven't used it much so please forgive my ignorance, but what is wrong with git rebase?

Unless there are third party C extensions involved.

Must have been utterly terrifying to pilot that thing... the entire aircraft is basically one gigantic fuel tank with a tiny space for a seat at the front.

Ah I see the problem. Actually I used a Ruby console.

So what then is the CORRECT way of doing this comparison in C, avoiding potential overflow pitfalls?

WTF? The article states:

  x = 1987654321 and y = -1987654321? Then the difference between them is -319658654 (negative) which proves that x is less than y. That’s less than correct.

Which is completely 100% wrong. Surely the difference would be x - y i.e (1987654321 - (-1987654321)) = (1987654321 + 1987654321) = 3975308642.

Which is perfectly ok, because that's positive and so proves x is greater than y. So this comparison works just fine for negative integers...