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That's not true when the topic is operating system kernels.

OS kernels? Everything from numpy to CUDA to NCCL is using C/C++ (doing all the behind the scene heavy lifting), never mind the classic systems software like web browsers, web servers, networking control plane (the list goes on).

Newer web servers have already moved away from C/C++.

Web browsers have been written in restricted subsets of C/C++ with significant additional tooling for decades at this point, and are already beginning to move to Rust.


There is not a single major browser written in Rust. Even Ladybird, a new project, adopted C++.

Firefox and Chrome already contain significant amounts of Rust code, and the proportion is increasing.

https://github.com/chromium/chromium : C++ 74.0%, Java 8.8%, Objective-C++ 4.8%, TypeScript 4.2%, HTML 2.5%, Python 2.4%, Other 3.3%

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox : JavaScript 28.9%, C++ 27.9%, HTML 21.8%, C 10.4%, Python 2.9%, Kotlin 2.7%, Other 5.4%

How significant?


According to https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/, 12%.

I would love an updated version of https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1flUGg6Ut4bjtyWdyH_9e... (which stops in 2020).

For Chrome, I don't know if anyone has compiled the stats, but navigating from https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/refs/heads/... I see at least a bunch of vendored crates, so there's some use, which makes sense since in 2023 they announced that they would support it.


> Web browsers have been written in restricted subsets of C/C++ with significant additional tooling for decades at this point

So, written in C/C++? It seems to me you're trying to make a point that reality doesn't agree with but you stubbornly keep pushing it.


> So, written in C/C++?

Not in the sense that people who are advocating writing new code in C/C++ generally mean. If someone is advocating following the same development process as Chrome does, then that's a defensible position. But if someone is advocating developing in C/C++ without any feature restrictions or additional tooling and arguing "it's fine because Chrome uses C/C++", no, it isn't.


Macbook trackpad is weird. On the other hand, it's excellent for most desktop tasks. But I just can't play almost any mouse-requiring game with it.

It's not for gaming, but I think it's just generally not a good interface for it.

Maybe that might be because acceleration curves are tweaked for most common use of browsing.

Pretty surprising. So IA64 registers were 65 bit, with the extra bit describing whether the register contains garbage or not. If NaT (Not a Thing) is set, the register contents are invalid and that can cause "fun" things to happen...

Not that this matters to anyone anymore. IA64 utterly failed long ago.


In case someone hasn't heard:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

> In 2019, Intel announced that new orders for Itanium would be accepted until January 30, 2020, and shipments would cease by July 29, 2021.[1] This took place on schedule.[9]


It matters to people designing new hardware and maybe new virtual machine instruction sets.

Or to people caring about their software working on more than just Chrome.

... oh wait, on more than x86(64).


There are modern VLIW architectures. I think Groq uses one. The lessons on what works and what doesn't are worth learning from history.

VLIW works for workloads where the compiler can somewhat accurately predict what will be resident in cache. It’s used everywhere in DSP, was common in GPU for awhile, and is present in lots of niche accelerators. It’s a dead end for situations where cache residency is not predictable, like any kind of multitenant general purpose workload.

IA64 was EPIC, which, itself, was a "lessons learned" VLIW design, in that it had things like stop bits to explicitly demarcate dependency boundaries so instructions from multiple words could be combined on future hardware with more parallelism, and speculative execution and loads, which, well, see the article on how the speculative loads were a mixed blessing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explicitly_parallel_instructio...


A more everyday example is the Hexagon DSP ISA in Qualcomm chips. Four-wide VLIW + SMT.

The new TI C2000 F29 series of microcontrollers are VLIW

I meant narrowly only about IA64. There is sure some lessons learned value.

Starlink will soon be (probably already is) 4G/5G capable. I'd be surprised if Kuiper won't get the same capability.

Can you give an example of a lower latency satellite service?

> Plus Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars

What about that Tesla that regularly crosses Mars orbit? Ok, it's not on Mars, but it was just about calculating an orbit. They could have smashed it on Mars as well.


Injecting a dummy payload into an eccentric helicentric orbit which periodically crosses' Mars' orbit /= a Mars mission. The complexity and relevance to future human presence on Mars isn't close

(Though tbf the choice of launch vehicle isn't that relevant to whether the ESCAPADE mission succeeds, and missions involving Mars flybys like Hera which are lot more serious than the Tesla one have been launched on SpaceX rockets)


If injecting a payload into an eccentric heliocentric orbit doesn't count, then why does injecting a payload into MEO count, just because that payload is then capable of getting to Mars from there? BO didn't launch it to Mars, they launched it to orbit, and ESCAPADE is now getting itself to Mars.

Because ESCAPADE is a mission to Mars which will orbit Mars and send back data from Mars and the dummy payload released by the Falcon Heavy test launch as a fun little meme which orbits the sun millions of miles from Mars isn't (It'd be easier to claim the SpaceX-launched deep space missions getting Mars gravity assists as Mars missions, at least those missions have actual success criteria related to Mars proximity and might take some photos on the way past).

A Mars mission is more of a Mars mission than launching something which isn't on a mission and doesn't go to Mars isn't very difficult to understand, unless you're actively trying not to. I'd already pointed out that the choice of launch vehicle is largely irrelevant to ESCAPADE's success; no shit they've got their own propulsion. The roadster would have needed it (and a suitable launch window or funky itinerary) to actually get to Mars too. I don't think it's crazy that despite having the engineers and cash to have got to Mars already SpaceX are being beaten by a payload built by one of their newspace contemporaries and launched by another, but a certain SpaceX chap does keep insisting that Mars is the all important destination.


If the choice of launch vehicle is largely irrelevant then how does this make any sense? We’re talking about the launch companies. The claim was “Blue Origin has beat SpaceX to Mars.” But they did no such thing. BO launched a payload into Earth orbit. They have nothing to do with where it goes from there. SpaceX didn’t get to Mars either but at least they were the ones who actually got the Roadster into heliocentric orbit.

The OP made the point (amongst many more dubious claims) that SpaceX was one of the few established launch providers that hadn't sent a payload to Mars. This is true (it says more about Mars not actually being a priority for SpaceX than it does about their technical capability, but that in itself is interesting). Another person suggested that we should count the Tesla roadster as a Mars mission; I pointed out that it shouldn't count as a Mars mission because it wasn't a Mars mission (and injecting a meme into a random deep space orbit isn't a more impressive display of technical prowess than deploying an actual mission payload to an L2 staging orbit; the whole point of the Roadster stunt was they didn't particularly care if the payload survived never mind where it ended up). It's not rocket science! Most stuff a Falcon 9 launches reaches its final orbit with its own propulsion; it still gets credited with the launch.

And I’d certainly credit BO with launching this payload to orbit. But saying they sent a payload to Mars doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s like saying a taxi took me to Europe, because they took me to the airport. A critical part of the journey, certainly, but only part.

Well if no launch provider gets credit for launching Mars missions unless they're also supplying the payload/propulsion this whole argument is moot (just leaves SpaceX behind Berkeley/Rocketlab and ISRO rather than Blue Origin and ISRO in the Mars race...)

If we're doing analogies to holidays, the Starman Tesla Roadster definitely hasn't proven its worth for visiting London, even though it's gone beyond it (and SpaceX could have made it hit London if they'd really wanted to, just ask Werner von Braun :-)

Quibbling about whether parties involved in conveying tourists to actually visit London receive undue credit for their segment of the journey, or whether the London Underground is more important than Gatwick flights which don't even reach City boundaries seems like pointless pedantry on the other hand, particularly if deployed in defence of the claim that flying away from London at escape velocity counts as a London visit.


Pretty clear SpaceX could have sent something to Mars for about 10 years, had they so wanted.

And also pretty clear that if Mars colonization was as imminent and important as an typical Elon comment on the subject suggests, they would have bothered with a probe by now...

Nice, the wording of "smashed it". Because, the point of getting to Mars or Mars orbit is that you need rocket burns to insert and to land on Mars. Getting to places in space is a delta-V game and paying only half your delta-V costs doesn't count because it doesn't work.

If that's why it matters, then why are you crediting BO for that when they didn't have anything to do with the parts which will be performing those burns?

I guess they get partial credit if those parts and payload are heavier than the car.

Alas for BO’s credit, the two spacecraft together are only a little over one ton.

These effects used to be much worse in the nineties, often even if you had a fancy sound card. Electrical noise is significantly reduced now.

Majority of sound cards up to late nineties used dual layer PCBs with terrible grounding strategies so even the ones bothering to condition power for analog section still audibly picked up interrupts, DMA transfers and CPU load.

Rather 89% PC players have an SSD. For the console players much less. People (read: hordes of kids) are still using PS3, PS4, etc.

I think they were talking specifically about this game, which is only available on PS5 and PC.

Edit: Forgot it was released recently on Xbox Series consoles but those also have SSDs.


Which doesn’t matter at all in the case of Helldivers 2 as it’s only available for PC, PS5, and XBS/X. That’s a good part of why PC players were so irritated, actually: when all this blew up a few months ago, the PC install sizes was ~133 GB vs the consoles’ 36 GB.

Helldivers 2 is only on current gen consoles so older ones are beside the point, the current ones use NVMe SSDs exclusively. PC is the only platform where HDDs or SATA SSDs might still come up.

And only a very small portion of that 11% have ONLY an HDD but now that it’s only 23gb it’s easier to justify using your precious SSD space for it.

Well, Samsung chose for example to stop supporting micro SD cards. Samsung just keeps chasing Apple, so I don't see any point to buy their phones anymore.

The only unique selling point Samsung has left I can think of are foldable phones.


I don't think anybody except you, me, and other geeks on forums like this, care about SD cards. I wish it were different.

A cosmonaut (or an astronaut) really should know better.


I wonder if he was truly Spying or if he was for example taking a picture of a checklist to review in his hotel room. Not excusing anything but it would add some context.


[flagged]


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