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9:41:37
hayley
Also, while unrelated, today I read a blog post by a server hardware company about its embedded operating system, and the post stated that "even in memory safe languages [..., hardware] memory protection is essential" which cracks me up. I guess it's the effects of long-term exposure to Unix or something.
9:42:51
hayley
(I suppose overflowing the stack would be very unfortunate, but what they mentioned sounded more like process isolation, with "tasks, the kernel, and drivers all in disjoint protection domains".)
9:44:46
beach
I guess they are selling hardware that has memory protection, so they can't be caught saying it is sometimes now required.
9:46:11
hayley
I'm not very familiar with server hardware, but the hardware apparently has embedded devices as well as more general purpose hardware, and application code only runs on the latter.
9:48:43
hayley
Ah, the embedded hardware is a replacement for a "baseband management controller", which is typically an ARM system-on-chip, and is used to have remote access to facilities which are usually only accessible through a physical interface, such as forcefully rebooting a server.
9:50:32
hayley
...and the BMC is also used to read off sensors, but why not just have the general purpose hardware read those sensors, as desktop computers do? Guess I don't run servers.
13:40:24
pjb
Interesting: https://theconversation.com/danish-children-struggle-to-learn-their-vowel-filled-language-and-this-changes-how-adult-danes-interact-161143 this could explain how a language such as Star Trek Tamarian could evolve. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tamarian_language
13:42:22
pjb
But more practically, it supports the importance when writing for a large and diverse public, to build a text using different techniques and relationships. A single short sentence may not be sufficient, but several sentences communicating the same idea in different way, calling up to different mental faculties and references may be indicated.
14:18:37
beach
pjb: My (admittedly small) family is a great believer in that technique. I should read Lisp in Small Pieces to see whether she practiced that idea in the translation.
17:41:23
beach
Dinner is imminent here, but I wanted to report that I think I finally made some progress on literals. I still don't coerce, but I think I have the rest figured out.
17:41:24
beach
But right now it is incredibly wasteful. To process a symbol, it must process the name and the package name as strings. And a string turns into a MAKE-ARRAY with a list of dimensions and and :ELEMENT-TYPE '<type>, and those three things are new literals. I think I at least need to use MAKE-STRING instead of MAKE-ARRAY for strings to avoid some of the waste.
17:42:49
beach
I created it as a separate module, and it is sufficiently complicated that it would be reasonable to extract it into a separate repository some day.
18:17:33
Bike
doing some extremely limited performance tests with what i have of cst-to-bir so far, by plugging it into clasp. on (lambda (x) x) cst-to-bir is a bit faster but it's marginal. on (lambda (x) (car (car (car (car (car (car (car x)))))))) the compiler with cst-to-bir is about twice as fast.
18:21:05
Bike
yeah, ok. with something without an inline definition there's less difference. so... inlining apparently slows things down quite a bit