pdw

I half expected to see this instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqfdoPAxiVk

And as it happens, early versions of Excel used a bytecode running on a VM instead of native code. Though the motivation was not portability, but rather memory requirements:

> In most cases, p-code can reduce the size of an executable file by about 40 percent. For example, the Windows Project Manager version 1.0 (resource files not included) shrinks from 932K (C/C++ 7.0 with size optimizations turned on) to 556K when p-code is employed.

> Until now, p-code has been a proprietary technology developed by the applications group at Microsoft and used on a variety of internal projects. The retail releases of Microsoft Excel, Word, PowerPoint®, and other applications employ this technology to provide extensive breadth of functionality without consuming inordinate amounts of memory.

http://sandsprite.com/vb-reversing/files/Microsoft%20P-Code%...

`strace -f -eopen,openat` to see which files a programs opens. Very often useful, even if just to check which config file(s) a program reads.

perhaps because high-dpi screens are getting common in the PC world?

Don't hold your breath, these rumors have been going for well over a decade:

2018: "The current owner of Symbolics displayed interest in open-sourcing Genera a few years ago but nothing happened since then." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17824330

2014: "The problem is that the Symbolics IP is now owned by John Mallery; he has stated he has plans for making it available but so far (several years) has not yet done so." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7882034

The software itself can easily be found these days, if you're interested for hobbyist reasons.

If I understand it correctly, The `<foo />` syntax is an XML invention. It was never added to HTML. Traditional HTML parsers see the slash as a malformed attribute and ignore it, and that behavior was codified in HTML5.

Wow, I had no idea that `<div/>` wasn't interpreted as `<div></div>`.

At the time, awk was the only scripting language (other than shell) generally available on Unix systems. Perl, Tcl, Python didn't exist yet. So awk was often used for general-purpose programming.

That's the situation in the US. In most of the EU, you can expect either 2G or 3G to be available for at least five more years.

It was never really clear to me if the "Hornet" was a custom design Intel did for HP or if "Hornet" was just the codename for the 80C186EA, a 186 with added powersaving support. Either way those palmtops were quite cool machines.

zlib/gzip did not choose DEFLATE because it was the best algorithm. Rather it was, at the time, the only decent algorithm that could be implemented in a manner not covered by patents. (See the tragedy of LZW for why that was important.)

We're now more than two decades later, so all the important data compression patents should have expired.

It has it, but the syntax is different:

    SELECT t->'j'->'foo'->'bar'->2, ... FROM tbl t ...

I think SQLite now also supports this syntax.

As one of the comments points out, Google sells 30TB accounts. With a 5M file limit, you need an average file size of 6MB to fill your drive.

I don't think so. Looks like Debian 12 will be released about 2 years after the previous release, which is about typical.

I think you underestimate memory errors. In large C and C++ projects, ~70% of discovered security vulnerabilities have memory errors as their cause. Source: https://alexgaynor.net/2020/may/27/science-on-memory-unsafet...

On the other hand, Google reports that "to date, there have been zero memory safety vulnerabilities discovered in Android’s Rust code." Source: https://security.googleblog.com/2022/12/memory-safe-language...

Nobody made a promise. The comment you're reacting to said "happens often to me".

The more serious issue is that this library apparently does not enforce a length limit on escape sequences.

Zero memory errors, not zero vulnerabilities.

In high-quality C and C++ projects, about 70% of vulnerabilities are caused by memory errors. (https://alexgaynor.net/2020/may/27/science-on-memory-unsafet...)

Yes. It usually gets glossed over, but if you're building a Python application it's all you need.

Not when creating tar files.

Portability between different compilers was a problem. People complain about C's portability, but at least you can rely on `fopen` existing. The best that Modula-2 offered was a semi-standard InOut module that provided stdin/stdout functionality (no files).

Eventually a real standard library was added by the ISO standard, but that was published about 10 years too late to have an impact.

I don't feel it's obvious at all. Is it not surprising that you can't reliably store chars to a file using fgetc/fputc?

OTOH I'm not surprised at all that embedded compilers play fast and loose with the standard.

In C23, `bool`, `true` and `false` are available without including `stdbool.h`.

Why do you think that GNU Hurd isn't working? The Debian Hurd port is completely self-hosting and makes regular releases.

Looks like payroll is going to be a problem. https://twitter.com/HaysKali/status/1593425305464541186

If you do a google image search for "supermarket fridge", half of the results are doorless.

If you have a stack of Adlib Gold cards, that might be true.

Though COBOL infamously has the ALTER statement, which allows you to rewrite code at run time ;)

If you have a BSD system, or if you have bsdgames installed, you can run "mille" to play Mille Bornes. This version was done by Ken Arnold, who also created the curses library. Even better, I seem to remember that Mille Bornes was the first program to use curses, but I can't find a citation for that now.

For discussion on SQLite 3.39.0, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31876604

I'm not sure why a minor SQLite bugfix release needs to be posted here.