Obvious and possible software innovations

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2021/04/01/obvious-and-possible-software-innovations-nobody-does/

144 149 5 years ago

scottlocklin.wordpress.com

dogman123• 5 years ago

“He would be hailed as a Jobs-like technical innovator if he had some of his slaves do this, and he would be remembered with gratitude, rather than as the sperdo who dumped his wife for sexorz with lip filler Cthulhu.”

Misogyny is really cool! Thanks Scott Locklin!

the_optimist• 5 years ago

There is nothing in this quote which implies a hatred of women, and perhaps you inferring it says more about you than about the quote.

cratermoon• 5 years ago

Misogyny isn't just about hate. Sexualization, denying agency,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/style/misogyny-women-hist...

pjc503• 5 years ago

Did you miss the "lip filler Cthulhu"?

clarge11205• 5 years ago

It was a joke about Bezo’s bad judgment re: life choices, not hatred of women. Let a guy make a joke about someone doing an ugly thing to his wife. Bezos became King of the World and then left his wife for a TV personality.

I give the guy credit for humor.

hermanradtke• 5 years ago

Rust is not an interpreted language, but it does attempt to satisfy the first point. The bindgen and cxx crates will attempt to generate the API from a C/C++ header file.

nivertech3• 5 years ago

1. Some modern PLs and frameworks are making ffi easier, without requiring writing manual wrappers, or using a code generators. I can't recall project names now, but they do exist. But yes, they're not widely used or supported.

2. BEAM (Erlang VM) has several native mechanisms to communicate with the outside world (both in-process and out-of-process). In-process ones: linked-in drivers (.so/DLL), NIFs (.so/DLL, like JNI), dirty schedulers. Out-of-process: ports (external executables), C-Nodes/JInterface (an Erlang cluster node interface can be written in any programming language, not just C or Java). See [1].

3. Morphing into a Single Image System OS would be ideal evolution for the cloud vendors. I don't think Mainframe or Heroku-style PaaS are good directions, though. I have many ideas in this field, but they need to be fleshed out first.

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/nivertech/erlang-on-osv-49278675#...

viksit• 5 years ago

Do elaborate on (3)?

nivertech3• 5 years ago

1. The first step would be to simplify and unify services. It's especially relevant to AWS, which has lots of overlapping services, built by independent teams.

Just look on this flowchat ("Which AWS container service should I use?"):

https://twitter.com/forrestbrazeal/status/140063975921564057...

2. The longer term solution would be something like DarkLang, "deployless" single image system development environment. Of-course it will be opinionated. It should include all best practices by default. I.e. think 128-factor, instead of Heroku's 12-factor.

3. Another direction is cloud-native or web-services oriented programming languages.

rzzzt• 5 years ago

JNA looks reasonable for accessing native code from Java: https://github.com/java-native-access/jna/blob/master/www/Ge...

jandrewrogers• 5 years ago

I’ve written software for a few different Single System Image systems. They are uniformly terrible in my experience because they actively hide material information about the system architecture that is critical for software performance and robustness. I wouldn’t recommend them at all — the “benefits” are greatly outweighed by the downsides in real operational environments.

There is a reason they disappeared even though they were popular at one time. I thought they were a great idea until I actually used them. It is very difficult to write scalable high-performance software on those types of systems, so many edge cases.

nivertech3• 5 years ago

There are two different things called Single System Image systems:

1. LISP machines, Smalltalk dev environments, etc. A modern example would be the DarkLang.

2. Distributed OS with process migration like MOSIX - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_system_image

The (1) are a good direction, but they're usually not distributed. I guess you're talking about (2) which was never properly implemented, or maybe they were problematic by design.

BTW, what do you think about Inferno and Plan9? They still have hobbyist communities around them, and some of their ideas influenced current mainstream SW like 9P protocol and GoLang channels.

JohnJamesRambo• 5 years ago

Cloud providers should admit they’re basically mainframes and write an operating system instead of the ad-hoc collection of horse shit they foist on developers.

Oh I like this one so much. I love the era and idea of the mainframe. I caught the tail end of it in college. Our research professors would send their statistics jobs over to the mainframe and get the dot matrix printouts back showing what treatments showed significance. Maybe I watched Tron too much too. I just love the idea of one big central computer doing all the processing.

bigiain3• 5 years ago

I just love the idea of one big central computer doing all the processing.

And yet at the same time, having a super computer in my pocket is spectacularly cool!

hulitu5• 5 years ago

Which can only siphon your data and play games.

bryanrasmussen• 5 years ago

Really, they should all run like Heroku and you’d never notice they were there.

right that sounds like a great business idea because then your cloud service company you're building will be easier to commoditize! Can't believe that Bezos guy didn't think of it.

underwater• 5 years ago

Feels like a list of stuff where he massively underestimates the complexity of the fields he's talking about.

Drag and drop UIs have, as he indentified, been tried. They were a leaky abstraction where incremental functionality was difficult to implement.

TimTheTinker5• 5 years ago

I think he means things like XCode's Interface Builder.

He's not massively underestimating the complexity as much as saying that huge swaths of that complexity are unnecessary, were it not for business requirements that often require us to do things the cheapest way possible (like hiring "fungible" web engineers to build an electron app instead of paying native platform engineers to build a first-class native app) -- and thus cause long-term harm.

whatshisface• 5 years ago

I have lightly used both web UI stuff and native UI stuff, and on the desktop at least, web UI concepts are lightyears ahead. I think native UI development for PCs will return when and if the concepts there catch up with the present state of the abstractions and patterns that work for web dev. GTK, the one I know the best, is still in an era where object orientation is a new and technically difficult thing to achieve. Not bad at all, but we can do things so much more advanced than that if we port over the lessons learned when inventing ways to manipulate and efficiently push updates to the document object model.

There are some projects working on this but they are not yet at the level of "copy paste works," or "you can use either a retina or non-retina display and it won't look badly scaled or blurry on either." But I hope this will be sorted out soon because there is a lot of software I want to write with it.

Zviedris• 5 years ago

Yeah, like could start list with just solve PvPN problem :)

drewcoo• 5 years ago

"The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them."

The fact that he thinks they would take money implies that he believes they would be complex. Simple problems shouldn't cost much to fix.

pjc503• 5 years ago

No, Visual Basic worked fine. People built an entire generation of native business apps in it. Drop a bunch of labels, buttons and textboxes, wire the list view up to the database, and away you go.

The hard problem is native vs. cross platform.

jacobsenscott• 5 years ago

I've never seen a web UI that couldn't be built, and built better, in an hour with an old school drag and drop gui builder. Unfortunately the web was built on markup, and markup is a terrible way to define a UI. There is really no way to make a good gui builder for html/css, so we are stuck with literally the worst possible way to build UIs today. CSS is 24 years old, and nobody has figured out a sane way to use it yet. We've gone from inline styles to "semantic" to BEM, and we've come full circle to what are basically inline styles (tailwind) and they all suck. Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today. In many ways the history of building UIs in HTML is just people trying to find ways to mimic a frames/tables layout without using frames and tables.

ironmagma3• 5 years ago

There are a ton of effective drag and drop GUI builders for HTML/CSS: Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, and Plasmic to name a few, and that's just the current generation (see also: Dreamweaver et al.).

Even html frames and tables were better than what we are using today

How? CSS and HTML can do practically everything frames could do (the only thing I can think of that doesn't apply is independent histories). There are a lot of different technologies at your disposal -- grid, which is probably the most intuitive; flex box; or just `position: fixed` divs.

la_fayette• 5 years ago

Is a gui tool really faster or better then directly writing the code? It is like using a cli vs using a gui... propably a hybrid approach would be best...

smsm422• 5 years ago

The whole HTML-ization of GUIs is crazy... It's like "ok, let's make a language that represents semantics of documents and leaves most of the presentation to the tools, so we could concentrate on content and not focus too much on irrelevant details of presentation" - "ok, cool idea, now let's take this language and use it to build pixel-precision GUIs that have no semantic content at all". Ugh, talk about right too for the job!

bigiain3• 5 years ago

So the answer is _Electron?_

I think way to many people massively underestimate the complexity they add to a problem when their solution involves Electron, React, and npm…

I’m less convinced than most commenters here that he’s underestimating the difficulty of some of what he proposes, he ends with:

“ The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them. Engineers are a defeated tribe; it’s cheaper to hire an “AI” (Alien or Immigrant) slave to write the terraform or electron front end rather than paying clever engineers well enough to build themselves useful tooling to make them more productive and the world a better place. ”

Amidst his snark (which I’ll acknowledge will put some readers off) and some borderline probable racist dog whistling (which certainly put me off a bit), he is totally acknowledging that these ideas require smart engineers with budgets and mandates to spend the time making them come true. He’s not suggesting the 12 week boot camp front end engineers should be parsing c header files and inspecting deeper I to he c code to discover the stuff you need to use those to auto generate interfaces for other languages. But surely some of the senior AWS engineers should be spending their time investigation his ideas about ec2 and cloud and OSes?

carapace• 5 years ago

Delphi was pretty awesome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_(software)

japhib• 5 years ago

I actually really dislike this whole post. There’s a really condescending tone lurking just beneath the surface for most of it. It’s also extremely hand-wavy about the problems, their causes, AND possible solutions. Also, so whiny. At this point I don’t care if he even has any good ideas because he’s made me so mad just by his writing style.

TimTheTinker5• 5 years ago

Perhaps he's a generation or two older, and doesn't want to go into a lot of technical detail to back up his opinion.

I think his perspective is valuable. He's seen a lot, and he's right that we could do to learn a few things from the past.

stickfigure• 5 years ago

I'm probably older than he is, and it seems whiny to me.

bawolff3• 5 years ago

What value is an opinion if you can't back it up?

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

I don't find it whiney at all.

I do agree it's a little condescending, and that it's got a bit of a rambling flow; from semi-technical to straight bitching, all the way around to political.

jtsiskin• 5 years ago

And randomly insults Lauren Sánchez’s appearance; seems like a weird thing to throw into an article about software..

approxim8ion• 5 years ago

Author belongs to the special class of people who think sounding like a dick makes them more authoritative. All their posts are like that.

StandardFuture3• 5 years ago

class of people who think sounding like a dick makes them more authoritative

It's a writing style. Like it or hate it.

Nonetheless, criticisms of writing style are far too cheap and shallow for HN. Be better.

na85• 5 years ago

Contrarily I love this post. The first point I don't care about because I avoid C whenever possible but I agree with all the rest.

Electron is awful. So are phones. These things don't have to be so.

Aeolun7• 5 years ago

I actually tried doing the native GUI thing, but I gave up when I found out I couldn’t do that without having to reimplement something as simple as an autocomplete dropdown. Yes, the native select has something like it, but it only reacts to typing the first characters, and you can’t style the results.

I guess some would call this a feature, but the customizability of HTML makes for a lot of good things as well.

superdisk• 5 years ago

You can't style the results

Good.

rishav_sharan2• 5 years ago

I started with some interest in this post but stopped reading when the author started saying nasty stuff about Bezos's wife. How is she remotely connected to this post? Why try to shame her for her looks or cosmetic choices?

The author is trying to hard to be edgy without being humourous or having the depth of idea that could have saved this.

kodablah2• 5 years ago

have all the functions described in it turned into reasonably safe FFIed function calls

Many langs get close with the ease of importing C headers (Go, Rust, etc), but once you ask for reasonably safe FFI'd calls, you're asking a bit too much since ownership goes out the window. Otherwise, if you mean turned into acceptably-unsafe FFI'd function calls, agree just about every lang with C interfacing built in should have that.

It’s fascinating to me that people find it easier to write a pile of React and HTML on top of electron rather than dragging and dropping native widgets for a framework like we did in the old days.

Ok, on my mark, you write a reasonably complex native GUI for the 5 common platforms (and including the wiring, not just drag-drop) and I'll write a reasonably complex GUI w/ web tech. Once you see the difference in time to market, not to mention reduced maintenance cost, it'll be less fascinating.

Other than those points, I somewhat agree w/ the others, or rather don't strongly disagree (the condescending tone notwithstanding).

madhadron• 5 years ago

Ok, on my mark, you write a reasonably complex native GUI for the 5 common platforms (and including the wiring, not just drag-drop) and I'll write a reasonably complex GUI w/ web tech.

Two things on this: this was Java's promise (and Swing delivered on it for the desktop). And the expectations of a web app/electron app are still lower than those of a native app.

jay_kyburz• 5 years ago

Ok, on my mark, you write a reasonably complex native GUI for the 5 common platforms

oh, it has to run in a browser too so that users don't need to "install" it.

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

Can Qt help with this? I'm unaware of it's WASM support, but it seems like just a matter of time before they have all the GUI elements.

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

Ok, on my mark, you write a reasonably complex native GUI for the 5 common platforms (and including the wiring, not just drag-drop) and I'll write a reasonably complex GUI w/ web tech.

I think you've missed the point of the title.

sudosysgen2• 5 years ago

Many Electron apps are native on mobile. So we really mean on all 3 desktop platforms.

The answer is obviously Qt or Java. It works.

kodablah2• 5 years ago

And many Electron apps are not native on mobile, just use a web view, and share many resources with their Electron cousins. Same with the web apps.

As someone who has written multiple Qt and Java GUI apps, it always seems fine at first until your UI needs become more unique (and you're subclassing QWidget/JComponent) and you have to jump through hoops to get something a web view has (e.g. streaming video).

I don't like the lack of native any more than the next guy, but I can understand sacrificing native benefits for cohesion/features. If you can tolerate a middleground of non-native but no-browser-bloat, Flutter or .Net Maui may mature enough to help for the complex uses.

l33t2328• 5 years ago

I’ve never heard of C function “ownership”. What does it mean?

pjc503• 5 years ago

Pointers passed in and out have a very important property that's critical for writing secure reliable programs but is not encoded anywhere in the language, and that is lifetime and ownership.

If you pass a pointer to a function, will it free() it? Or store it somewhere where it will later free it? Can you now free it yourself safely or not?

Same applies to returned pointer values: don't free or must free?

vorpalhex• 5 years ago

So obvious and possible the author is ranting about them instead of writing them...

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 5 years ago

Automated FFI parsers. In 2021 I should be able to point any interpreted language at a C include file and have all the functions described in it turned into reasonably safe FFIed function calls,

The big issue with doing this is that C does not have enough of a type system to exactly specify the interface. Is that char pointer, a null terminated string, or is it a pointer to an untyped buffer? What is the ownership of the pointer you are passing in or is being returned from the function? Are you allowed to pass in null for the pointer parameter?

All of these are questions that the C type system does not tell you. You have to rely on some type of documentation to figure it out. And if you get it wrong, you have a memory leak at best or a security while at worse.

andrewflnr2• 5 years ago

There's definitely still a lot of scut work the compiler could (and therefore should, in my view anyway) be doing for you. Even if it got you to the point where you can setup those safety invariants in your interpreted (or whatever) language, that would be nice.

_ph_• 5 years ago

I think this points to the real answer: libraries should be defined by something else than the C headers we are using now. All automated solutions or parsing C headers require a C compiler present and as you write, there is a lot left unspecified.

contextfree• 5 years ago

Windows has partly moved and is moving in this direction - WinRT (higher-level, C#-like but without requiring the .NET runtime and GC) APIs are already defined in metadata, and now Win32 (lower-level, C-style) APIs are being defined that way as well: https://github.com/microsoft/win32metadata/blob/master/docs/...

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

I agree with the general sentiment of this post, but like others, I think some explanations lack depth and possibly miss important active developments.

This passage made me laugh though:

The funny thing is, the same people who absolutely insist that the Church Turing thesis means muh computer is all-powerful simulator of everything, or repeat the fantasy that AI will replace everyone’s jobs will come up with elaborate reasons why these things listed above are too hard to achieve in the corporeal world, despite most of them being solved problems from the VLSI era of computer engineering.

pdamoc• 5 years ago

Gerald Sussman of SICP fame was asked why they stop teaching SICP and he said that the way programming was being done changed mid 90s. It moved from programming from first principles to programming against an API. This is still the reality of most.

You have to be big enough or brave enough to move back to reinventing the whole universe.

In theory, any large company could use projects like Oberon and "STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming" as an inspiration and create a full stack that runs GUIs on all platforms.

In practice this is a monumental undertaking that not even companies like Apple could do. They still reused BSD for macos and KHtml for Safari.

jolux2• 5 years ago

Apple could absolutely do it (or Microsoft, or Google, or Amazon) but there’s no justification for it from a business perspective.

upforgrabs2• 5 years ago

fuchsia seems like a solid attempt by goog to write a ground up os

Aeolun7• 5 years ago

Google sort of did it with Android and Apple with iOS and it worked out really well for them.

Rochus• 5 years ago

could use projects like Oberon and "STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming"

Like Dart, Flutter & Fuchsia?

speedgoose3• 5 years ago

There are many reasons why developers use Electron for GUI development. The size of the final package is not very important, and creating many times the same native application is not that appealing. Having a cross platform, responsive, and a modern high quality framework is much more appealing.

andrewflnr2• 5 years ago

The size of the final package is not very important

You can only install so many packages with this philosophy before size starts to be important after. More to the point, you can only run a few of them at a time, on machines with gigabytes of RAM. This is a profound embarrassment to our industry. If by "responsive" you're referring to input latency, Electron apps are at best on par with native, usually worse IME. If by "responsive" you mean accommodating different displays... it's a desktop app. Your statement about a "high quality framework" is basically orthogonal to reality, but I'd like to see you justify rating React "higher quality" than Qt5.

Aeolun7• 5 years ago

I can start building in React today, and style literally everything without really thinking about it.

I can start with Qt5 today, and give up screaming in rage tomorrow because I can’t get my select dropdown to display what I want.

speedgoose3• 5 years ago

I understand the performance criticism. But people don't have that many apps, storage is cheap and we have plenty of ram. Today a high end smartphone has 128gb of storage and 8gb of ram. Some have 512gb of storage and 12gb of ram. An actual high end desktop computer has at least 64gb of ram and enough storage to have quite a lot of Electron runtimes installed side by side.

My M1 MacBook pro with only 8gb of ram, I asked 16gb but someone did an ordering mistake, has no issues to run multiple electrons apps at the same time and storage is not something I think about.

By responsive I mean accomoding different display sizes, to have a layout that makes sense on a small laptop with a touchscreen or a 4k 32" external display.

For most usages, I will rate react much higher than Qt5, like almost everyone one in the the industry. The only Qt interface that I think is nice and up to modern standards, and that I remember is the Tesla user interface. It may be a few others because sometimes Qt makes sense, but not for desktop in my humble opinion.

roca5• 5 years ago

I only had to read the first few sentences of the first point to see that the author thinks problems are easy because they don't understand the difficulties.

Parsing C function prototypes doesn't give you enough information to write safe language bindings. For example if you see "char* make_stuff(const char* param);", you don't know whether the memory pointed to by 'param' can be reused after the function call, or whether the function actually took ownership of it. You don't even know how many bytes of memory 'param' has to point to, because you don't know whether 'param' points to a null-terminated string or something else. Likewise you don't know how many bytes of memory the returned pointer points to, you don't know whether the caller is responsible for freeing it, and if they are you don't know how to free it. You don't know whether it's safe to call this function concurrently from multiple threads. You don't know whether 'param' or the return value are allowed to be NULL or not. And this is nearly the simplest possible example!

TimTheTinker5• 5 years ago

You raise a good point, but the OP's point still stands. All we'd need is comments in header files with the extra type information encoded, and automated FFI would be possible.

Not to say that would be easy... building a type system on top of a language that lacks it is anything but easy, but it's possible. TypeScript is an excellent example.

roca5• 5 years ago

The OP's point is very clearly "we could just parse C header files and do it all automatically", not "we could parse C header files and a bunch of extra handwritten metadata and then do the rest automatically". The latter point is certainly more defensible but it's not the point they made, and it's much weaker ... I mean of course if you add extra metadata you can generate whatever FFI glue you need. The devil is then in the details.

jolux2• 5 years ago

I think having to manually annotate C headers with extra type information starts to reduce the benefits of automatically generating FFI interfaces. Rust already has bindgen which goes pretty far.

nixpulvis5• 5 years ago

Did you just imply that we put the comments of C headers into our types?! Comments are lower than whitespace as far as the compiler should be sure.

As I'm sure you are aware https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen does basically what you want.

I'm actually quite curious where exactly rust-bindgen falls short in the eyes of the author. I'm not as familiar with the other FFI libraries the OP linked.

masklinn• 5 years ago

All we'd need is comments in header files with the extra type information encoded, and automated FFI would be possible.

That’s SWIG. It’s something like 15 years old, possibly more.

building a type system on top of a language that lacks it is anything but easy, but it's possible. TypeScript is an excellent example.

That has nothing to do with the issue at hand. You can compile haskell to c, that does not help FFI-ing to unannotated C functions.

injidup• 5 years ago

My thoughts exactly. For somebody complaining that these tools don't exist because people are too lazy or whatever he himself is too lazy to do a quick google search to see that these tools do exist. I was using SWIG (http://www.swig.org/) 15+20 years ago to bind C/C++ to Perl and Java and it still exists. However your point above stands in that you have to annotate the headers with enough information about memory ownership to make it work.

The tone of the article also goes mad bigot when he starts whining about (AI) ( Aliens and immigrants ) taking our jobs for less money.

strken• 5 years ago

As someone who found an old I-94 in his wallet last week and spent a while as an alien, I try to be sympathetic to those sort of rants. It is genuinely frustrating when employers solve problems by finding a cheaper labour force instead of automating an unnecessary process or fixing the underlying technical issue.

A company I once worked for that will remain nameless paid an entire team of people in the Philippines to read global weather reports and respond to them instead of integrating with the relevant APIs, solely because it would have been a higher upfront cost to get expensive US-based engineers to do the work, and I found it infuriating: partly because the time of the two groups was valued so differently, but also because it was just so inelegant and pointless.

psyc• 5 years ago

I didn’t take the AI bit to be about “tik er jurbs” but rather about employers’ attitude towards developers. That would be more in keeping with the theme of the overall rant.

Animats3• 5 years ago

* I was using SWIG 15+20 years ago to bind C/C++ to Perl and Java and it still exists.*

(OK, who broke the * for italics markup?)

I've used it. It took the entire thing you want to call and generated one giant file of munged C. That's sort of where that idea takes you.

But the author is on to something. There's a C to Rust translator. It sucks, because it works by emulating C pointer arithmetic in unsafe Rust, using its own set of primitives along the lines of "offset this pointer by this much". Now you have ugly, unsafe Rust.

What's needed is something that infers the meaning of an ambiguous function call from the code. Something that reasons like this:

Function call:

    int read(char* buf, size_t n)

Analysis:

Is "buf" an array, or a reference to one item?

Examine C code for "read". Is it ever used in an array context, like subscripting or pointer arithmetic? Possible results are "no, definitely not an array", "yes, definitely an array", and "can't decide, code is too confusing". One would like the third case to be rare.

If it's an array, how big is it? Possible results are inferred from the highest subscript seen, as an expression. Is it an expression on some variable at the interface? If it can be determined that the length of buf is n, the function call can be changed to a Rust slice for which .len() will work.

Pointer arithmetic needs to be analyzed by symbolic execution, treating each pointer as an (array, pointer into array) pair. If the array associated with a pointer never changes during the lifetime of the pointer, tracked all the way down the call tree, then the pointer can be represented as a subscript. Subarrays passed by pointer become slices.

This won't work all the time. Sometimes you'll need hints from the user. It would be tempting to guess using something like GPT-3, doing the conversion to safe code, and seeing if it worked. Most of these things are idioms, which is how humans convert them. Translation can be wrong in two ways - subscripts going out of range and being caught, and things using too much memory because a worst case overestimated something.

All the heavy work is in figuring out the equivalent, but not identical, data representation. Once that's figured out, converting the executable code is reasonably straightforward. There's already a dumb C to Rust translator for most of that.

solresol• 5 years ago

... and yet, Ada95 managed to include (as part of the standard for the language) the ability to bind to C, C++, Fortran and Cobol. All of which have absurdly different calling conventions and assumptions about memory.

roca5• 5 years ago

I don't know anything about Ada95's FFI but it can't magically answer the questions I posed. Either it requires extra information not in the prototypes, or it makes assumptions about the C code that won't always be true (and will have catastrophic consequences when they're not true), or it gives up on safe binding and offloads responsibility for handling those issues to the programmer.

CheezeIt• 5 years ago

You can perfectly well make a tool that emits incomplete JS API’s with some human interaction to specify details of ownership and object representation.

In you could reuse much of it for multiple target languages.

In fact, you can also make FFI wrappers automatically, and handle the memory safety with wrappers on the JS side.

raverbashing• 5 years ago

You're right.

Because C conflates pointers with arrays. It conflates giving an array to a function with giving a space for it to write because there's no difference (besides the 'in'/'out' keyword which I'm not even sure is official)

C is defective out of the box.

smsm422• 5 years ago

All those difficulties are real, and yet, FFI exists and is useful. Of course it won't work in 100% cases, but it would work in many cases, because all those things that you describe aren't random - usually libraries have certain conventions on what the pointers mean, who frees them, etc. What the author is asking for is extending the basic service FFI provides to make it more useable and accessible. Still wouldn't solve 100% of causes, and still the questions like "is it thread safe" would never be part of it - so what? There are many use cases which can live without answering this question.

dvfjsdhgfv• 5 years ago

I only had to read the first few sentences of the first point to see that the author thinks problems are easy because they don't understand the difficulties.

It's because you haven't read it till the end. He explains these things haven't been solved exactly because they are difficult and (he believes) unmonetizeable.

annica• 5 years ago

I actually really like this whole post. Every time I think about quitting HN altogether a rare gem like this comes along. You should be able to have a little fun with common pain points we all have to deal with. The author has some pretty good suggestions as well. But I almost lost my drink with this one:

“ Imagine if the EC2 were as clean as, I dunno, z/OS, which has more or less been around since the 1960s. That would be pretty cool. I could read a single book instead of 100 books on all the myriad tools and services and frameworks offered by Oligarch Bezos. He would be hailed as a Jobs-like technical innovator if he had some of his slaves do this, and he would be remembered with gratitude, rather than as the sperdo who dumped his wife for sexorz with lip filler Cthulhu.”

Comedy gold.

solatic• 5 years ago

Part of what makes it funny is that if Bezos somehow got IBM to license z/OS to AWS to offer z/OS as a service on-demand, that it would likely be incredibly lucrative.

JanecekPetr• 5 years ago

Automated ffi parser soon (TM) to be in standard Java: https://github.com/openjdk/panama-foreign/blob/foreign-jextr...

ggm• 5 years ago

Operating systems don’t have to look like your crazy hoarder aunt’s house

This.

ajarmst2• 5 years ago

If they're so easy and obvious, why hasn't the author done it, at least as a demo? The article also reeks of "this doesn't work for me, therefore it won't work for anyone" I doubt I'm the only one who absolutely does not concede that everything should have a GUI interface.

"Why does shit like DPDK exist?" I don't know, but I bet you could find out with a little investigation, which might make this sound more like a well-researched position and less like a tantrum.

"people who absolutely insist that the Church Turing thesis means muh computer is all-powerful simulator of everything". Yeaaah...we're done here.

ajarmst2• 5 years ago

The author's about page reports that he is a former physicist with experience in automotives and law enforcement. It also contains the statement "I have a particular dislike of self-anointed 'experts';" with no apparent irony.

And my personal favourite: "People may think I’m fighting above my weight class, because many of the people I label as clowns are on television and in important newspapers, much like the stars of 'The Bachelor.' "

Uh huh.

clarge11205• 5 years ago

The guy has a sense of humor that is both effective and rubs The Offended the wrong way.

suhas2go• 5 years ago

who's this guy again?

Santosh83• 5 years ago

Engineers are a defeated tribe; it’s cheaper to hire an “AI” (Alien or Immigrant) slave to write the terraform or electron front end rather than paying clever engineers well enough to build themselves useful tooling to make them more productive and the world a better place.

Offensive passage that subtly implies immigrants from the developing world are slavish (and dehumanising them as well, using the word alien), incapable of intelligence, and who're undercutting honest-to-god 'engineers', and preventing the world from becoming a better place.

I'm astonished that hordes of people are still ready to sell their first born if they can get a citizenship amid such a culture of passive racism and superiority complex.

Aeolun7• 5 years ago

I'm astonished that hordes of people are still ready to sell their first born if they can get a citizenship amid such a culture of passive racism and superiority complex.

Can you imagine how bad it is where they come from?

hulitu5• 5 years ago

No. He is just astonished. I am also astonished that a so called good manager will outsource a project to a "third world" country because he thinks this is cheaper and the poor guy in the third world country must reinvent the wheel and be "creative" because he is denied money (for equipment) and knowledge. ("just take this code and continue").

clarge11205• 5 years ago

There is no racism here, subtle or otherwise, and I say this as a black engineer watching this happen every single day. Engineers are not allowed to talk about how their jobs are being replaced by web development in every possible corner even where it doesn’t fit.

It is much cheaper to hire 5 offshore web devs for 5 weeks to force a solution into a web interface and then have an onshore dev spend 2 weeks turning web UI into an Electron app than it is to build any other type of solution.

He is simply stating the issue rather than not stating it.

wokwokwok• 5 years ago

The reality is they’re all quite possible, but nobody makes money doing them.

You don't get nice things for free.

Seriously, we could build a space station around Jupiter if we reallllly wanted to. It would be hard, and people would probably die, but if you really wanted to, you could do it.

Similar story for these problems: Solvable? yes.

Valuable?

Well... maybe; but probably hard enough that you can't do them for free, and not valuable enough to justify the cost and effort of doing them.

Engineers are a defeated tribe...

Is that the take-away here? Be sad, give up? Go and build some electron apps?

There are two problems here: doing (hard task), and paying for it; you can solve either of them by either a) volunteering your time to work on (hard task) or, b) helping fund people who are.

Not to say that the points raised are all invalid, and enumerating things which are worth working on is also helpful, but yeah, well, when people are trying to address them, and all you've got to say is:

You see pieces of this idea here and there, but like everything else about modernity, they suck.

...complaining that no one else is doing either of these two things, or the ones that are trying suck, is... well, I'm going to be generous and say, entitled.

spullara• 5 years ago

Some responses:

1. Java is adding this with Panama. Definitely a sore point and should be standard when folks are making their languages. https://openjdk.java.net/projects/panama/

2. Meh.

3. This is exactly how to get zero people to use your cloud. Everyone would love to do this but adoption risk is too high.

4. This will never pass muster when it encounters design. There are plenty of tools that do this but generate half-hearted interfaces. Xcode (interface builder) does a pretty good job of it anyway but folks will still want to customize their UIs.

5. Fair criticism.

6. I think that CoreOS was a step in the right direction. Not sure if they have seen it.

piyush_soni• 5 years ago

Re: Point 4:

I think C# Windows Forms are a great example of that (drag and drop GUI for creating GUI forms), and I wonder why no one is making things that easy in a cross-platform manner anymore!

clarge11205• 5 years ago

It would take the resources of a Microsoft, with their decades of language and OS experience to create such a thing. And, Microsoft has no interest whatsoever in encouraging a cross platform desktop ecosystem.

manigandham• 5 years ago

Microsoft is working on it, it’s called MAUI: https://github.com/dotnet/maui

dukeofdoom• 5 years ago

The world is the way it is because of a series of compromises and negotiations by competing interests. It's easy to look from one perspective and only see the hilltop, and think you can get there by taking the straight road.

jupp0r2• 5 years ago

I really dislike the article, here are some reasons (referencing the numbered arguments in the article).

1. There are many such parsers. Rusts bindgen [1] is one of them, I have written a proprietary one last year. This is pretty common to do for narrow use cases, there just isn't one for "Convert a C API to Ruby"..

2. "Most VM designs I’ve seen are basically just student exercises". Seriously? Create a better on and get rich then! I'm pretty sure Google would pay good money for something better than v8.

3. You can run z/OS on EC2. They do very different things. It's like saying I wish that cars were as simple as a strawberry.

4. "People used to make GUI frameworks which did more than electron apps, looked better and fit in the tens of kilobytes range." That's correct and that's why lots of apps are based on native UI frameworks. For some use cases, electron seems to hit a sweet spot (mostly not having to write UI for each platform and the web too). If you don't like electron apps, don't use them, most run in the browser too.

5. "Compilers and interpreters should learn how modern computers work." I don't know where to begin here. Modern compilers optimize for latest hardware all the time, one recent example out of thousand others is this [2] where V8 redundantly inserts short functions into memory regions close to the code they are called from in order to get more instruction cache hits.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-bindgen

[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/google-chrome-is-now-dramatic...

pdimitar2• 5 years ago

Look, I agree that the article could've used a more productive tone but saying "just don't use Electron apps" is misguided.

We don't have a choice. IMO it's perfectly fine to be consistently unhappy on that point and to rant about it.

jupp0r2• 5 years ago

You can be perfectly unhappy, sure. My point was just to go a little deeper than just rant and talk about the economics of why companies choose electron in spite of all the disadvantages it comes with.

mcqueenjordan• 5 years ago

An incredible optimization of Dunning–Kruger × Bravado.

vzaliva• 5 years ago

"Pretty much all compilers and interpreters think computers are a PDP-11 stack machine" shows that authour have no idea how modern compilers work. A ton of low-level optimizations and code generation are utilizing intrinsic knowledge of details of underlying computer architecture.

FounderBurr• 5 years ago

Somebody call this clown a whaaaaambulance.

xfer• 5 years ago

There are some conflicting things, why would you do a clean OS design(this would be great and i would very much like to see some experiment with serious effort) and write it in C? You would already be throwing most of useful programs that exist today. If you no longer write it in C why would you need to parse C headers for calling "foreign" code?

The point on software not taking enough advantage of hardware is on point. I would also like the hardwares(e.g. SSDs) to expose a bit more how they work rather than have another CPU emulating spinning disks.

mackrevinack• 5 years ago

7. software that allows you to add an empty line in between numbered lists

eezing• 5 years ago

I hate this post.

lamontcg• 5 years ago

Cloud providers should admit they’re basically mainframes and write an operating system instead of the ad-hoc collection of horse shit they foist on developers. Imagine if the EC2 were as clean as, I dunno, z/OS, which has more or less been around since the 1960s. That would be pretty cool. I could read a single book instead of 100 books on all the myriad tools and services and frameworks offered by Oligarch Bezos. He would be hailed as a Jobs-like technical innovator if he had some of his slaves do this, and he would be remembered with gratitude, rather than as the sperdo who dumped his wife for sexorz with lip filler Cthulhu. There’s no excuse for this from an engineering perspective; Bezos was smart enough to know he was going to do timesharing, he was also smart enough to constrain the spaghetti into something resembling an OS. Same story with all the other cloud services. Really, they should all run like Heroku and you’d never notice they were there. You could also draw flowcharts for most of this shit and replace devops with something that looks like labview. Nobody will do that either, as innovation in core software engineering, or even learning from the past in core software engineering is basically dead.

Heh, no Bezos was not smart enough to realize he was building a horizontally scalable mainframe out of commodity parts. All he knew was that they'd driven IT costs down below what anyone in the business had seen in other companies to the point where they could drop some APIs on it and sell it. Plus google was publishing papers like GoogleFS and coming up with GMail and everyone wanted to be seen to be as smart as them. This bit in particular: "he was also smart enough to constrain the spaghetti into something resembling an OS" is "lol, no". The big pile of web APIs was his vision. Literally its called Amazon Web Services.

Animats3• 5 years ago

Front ends could be drag and drop native GUIs instead of electron apps

We had Visual Basic. We had Dreamweaver. We had Microsoft FrontPage. What went wrong?

Most web pages really aren't doing anything that exciting.

hulitu5• 5 years ago

Front ends could be drag and drop native GUIs instead of electron apps
We had Visual Basic. We had Dreamweaver. We had Microsoft FrontPage. What went wrong?

Visual basic was only used to run macros in Office documents. And then viruses. And then MS killed it. Dreamweaver ? Hello Adobe. Frontpage ? Was broken by design.

SW is only about inovations. It does not need to last. It must be new.

Most web pages really aren't doing anything that exciting.

Data collection is a very exciting thing, so I heard.

mikewarot• 5 years ago

Visual basic was only used to run macros in Office documents. And then viruses. And then MS killed it.

No, it got used to do a lot of things, so did Delphi.

VB6 was awesome, then they decided to abandon a good thing and went off on the stupid .NET folly.

Aeolun7• 5 years ago

Every time I read something like this, I think how much I want a true cross platform GUI library with the customizability of HTML/CSS, determine to build it myself, then give up before I even start when I realize how much work it’s going to be.

clarge11205• 5 years ago

Same here. A native cross-platform GUI library with HTML/CSS native markup would set the works aflame.

It would take many man-years to build, and would take the dedication of Torvolds and the core Linux team to bring into the world.

Animats3• 5 years ago

Operating systems don’t have to look like your crazy hoarder aunt’s house.

If all the bare metal OS is doing is running containers in a data center, it should look more like Xen and less like Linux.

Miiko• 5 years ago

Looks like nobody noticed the date at the top of the page:

"Posted in tools by Scott Locklin on April 1, 2021"

aleclm• 5 years ago

At rev.ng we're developing ludwig, a clang-based automatic generator of wrappers for C++ APIs. First we generate C API and then generate wrappers for dynamic languages such as Python/Ruby/JS.

It's basically SWiG done right. Trying to write a C++ parser is a design doomed to fail.

In C++ ownership is much more explicit than C on average. The idea is to have a Python wrapping object for each C++ pointer. This wrapper can be owning or non-owning: if it's owning calls `delete` once the wrapper is destroyed. If a C++ function returns a std::unique_ptr we map it to an owning wrapper. If a C++ function returns an object by value we `std::move` it on a new object on the heap and map it to an owning pointer. If a C++ function returns naked pointers, we map it to a non-owning wrapper. The system is extensible, for instance you can say that a owner<int *> (see C++ Core Guidelines) is actually owning.

The wrapper can also be const or non-const, exposing the appropriate methods accordingly.

Also you have a lot of patterns you can exploit to provide high level constructs in scripting languages (e.g., `.begin` + `.end` ranges can become Python generators rather easily).

Here you can find the design document:

    https://pad.rev.ng/s/__WrFSmm_#

Right now, we're struggling with default template arguments. Many STL classes have default template arguments which make the name of types look ugly.

Also, we currently instantiate all the methods of template classes. But not all methods are supposed to be instantiate with all the possible template values. If you do instantiate those, you can run into compile errors. This means we have to resort to a sort trial and error approach to see what it actually makes sense to instantiate.

ludwig will be open source, but still needs some love before going public.

whereistimbo• 5 years ago

I haven't read this and I am very puzzled this is flagged. I'm lucky to fav this before this goes flagged. At a glance, this doesn't seem to be insulting or whatnot.

radiator2• 5 years ago

Why was this article censored? Was it done without an explanation? I do not find one.

radiator2• 5 years ago

I got downvoted at least twice, but noone bothered to link to the explanation why this article is no longer visible.

Obvious and possible software innovations

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