Because it isn’t mentioned in the blog post:

Kiesel (/ˈkiːzəl/) is a JavaScript engine written from scratch for the purpose of me learning the Zig programming language, with the eventual goal of full support for the latest ECMAScript standard.

If the author is reading this, I’d suggest to include a short blurb about what your project is when you make a blog post about a release. Some of your readers might not know!

score 1 · canonical

Good eyes! I didn’t catch that at all.

The Apple store also told him where the five empty boxes were mailed. For those, he didn’t even walk into the store with physical evidence; all he had were the case IDs. Several paragraphs earlier:

In the message he sent me five Apple repair case IDs. […] I find out that he created the repair requests under his personal Apple account rather than the company account, preventing me from gathering more information about the requests.

I’m wondering if he had some other evidence, such as being able to show that his company was the purchaser. I also wonder if this is just a case of a true-but-embellished story, because it didn’t strike me as entirely fake, either.

score 1 · canonical

I tried setting the minimum release age to “one month” because it takes Microsoft at least that long to remove reported malware. This caused dependency issues where PNPM struggled to match suitable versions. I settled for “one day”; long enough to allow some other sucker to beta test the next Shai‑Hulud.

I realize dependency resolution is hard enough as it is, but this feels like it could be added as just another layer on the existing optimization problem. Ideally, all of your dependencies would be at least one month old. But if that can’t be satisfied, you’d like to find a solution with as many old versions as possible: minimize the maximum timestamp or something.

score 1 · canonical

One detail that was fun to find was that height map files also have a palette! It is not simply a gray ramp. It’s a false-color palette split into bands of 16 shades each: blues, then oranges, and so on, with a gray band further up and magenta filling the unused entries. Open a D file in a paint program with this palette and you get a contour map, where each color band covers 16 height units. I’ll try to confirm this with Kyle Freeman himself, but I can definitely see NovaLogic artists using exactly that view to paint and check their terrain files.

You can’t just mention that and not drop a screenshot! :-)

score 1 · canonical

How does that work? Or, what’s the benefit of using two stacks?

I presume the “push” stack uses CAS or similar in order to keep the multiple producers from stepping on each other’s toes. You don’t need CAS for the “pop” stack, but the consumer will still periodically have to transfer elements from one stack to another, and that will still require some synchronization.

I guess what I’m asking is, if both enqueue and dequeue have to use atomics, why would you build two stacks instead of, say, a double-ended linked list?

score 1 · canonical

And here I was, patting myself on the back for getting to 90% comprehension for the regular amortized approach. (I feel like I just barely understand it, which means I probably don’t!)

I haven’t read the de-amortized approach yet other than skimming the article, but my initial feeling is the two-stack approach is quite a bit simpler/easier to understand. At least by the line count of the sample code, the de-amortized code is quite a bit longer. Whereas one of the merits of the two stacks is that you can sum up the approach in a paragraph and get over halfway there.

Thanks for the link! I’ll have to come back to this when I have more time.

score 1 · canonical