• 4 Posts
  • 34 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 27th, 2023

help-circle







  • One problem with exceptions is composability.

    You have to rely on good and up-to-date documentation or you have to dig into the source code to figure out what exceptions are possible. For a lot of third party dependencies (which constitute a huge part of modern software), both can be missing.

    Error type is a mitigation, but you are free to e.g. panic in Rust if you think the error is unrecoverable.

    A third option is to have effect types like Koka, so that all possible exceptions (or effects) can be checked at type level. A similar approach can be observed in practical (read: non-academic) languages like Zig. It remains to be seen whether this style can be adopted by the mainstream.







  • It’s not that the author picked Rust for scripting. All Rust game engines (e.g. Bevy) use Rust as the scripting language.

    Compare this with Godot, which is implemented in C++, but supports GDScript and many other languages for scripting.

    Also, only supporting Rust is not considered a limitation, but a feature here. Bevy’s ECS is tied up with Rust’s trait system, therefore it’s impossible to use a different language.

    So if Rust as a system programming language should not be used for game scripting, then projects like Bevy are fundamentally flawed. The author is willing to go there, but I don’t know if many people would go that far.

    There could be a Godot-like engine written in Rust that supports easier scripting languages, but I think that space is not explored due to the fact that Godot already exists.







  • The original “agile” is a reaction to the overly rigid planning and emphasizes worker self-management. It makes sense since the people who are closest to the work (the workers) know best how to plan and implement the work.

    It immediately breaks down when a specialized management tier emerges and tries to push their own agenda, i.e. to sell themselves rather than do something meaningful.

    At this point, whichever form is used doesn’t matter. The management, endowed with the power from above, will exploit the weakness of any agile-shmagile methodology to push their own agenda.



  • To be good at programming, a lot of knowledge is needed, but “accidental”. From practical ones like how to use git, to conceptual ones like cache performance mental model. It’s perfectly possible that git is designed with a different CLI, or the common cache line size being 512 bytes. Mathematicians usually don’t care about these things, since they are accidental. So they are bad at writing programs that’s far away from math.

    It’s a completely different story when they are writing programs about math. If the tool is good enough, i.e. allowing them to express math ideas in familiar terms, mathematicians are very good at writing math programs. As can be observed in Lean and mathlib.