Still knocked off the recent remounting of the horse. It’s blazing hot at work, still got the aching elbows and possibly some related fatigue (hard to say what it is causing it, maybe it’s the heat). Just trying to take it pretty easy for a bit.
Poking around looking at different things, I ran onto a language in development by Jonathan Blow (game developer), called Jai. It is his attempt at a C++ killer for game development. The size of it looks more like C than C++, but with some C++ features. I don’t know what I don’t know, but I don’t know why it couldn’t be used for general programming. And I think he is actually calling it a systems language at this point. He hasn’t released it yet, stating that he doesn’t want to release more garbage into the world like so many other programmers are doing today, but it is in the hands of 100 people and being used to develop some games. Watching some videos of him talking about various things to do with programming and software, I’m a fan already. His thoughts on C++ a couple of years back is that it is still ok but headed to becoming too big and unmanageable. Some cool things that I have seen so far are that Jai compiles very fast (and he says that it should be doable to get it compiling 8x faster still with some ordinary optimizations in the compiler), doesn’t need make files, compiles to the current platform without any changes. He is also saying that he wants to develop an os and talks about why it is doable, despite the naysayers. One point he mentioned here is a driverless os. He is on odysee, twitch, and youtube.
I’m sure it will be nice enough, it’s been 8 years in the making so shouldn’t be long now. The automatic Array of Structs conversion to/from Structs of Arrays is nice, and the compile time code, and the compile times.
Btw Google have just announced Carbon, a C++ replacement. The C++ committee rejected a paper a couple of years back that tried to get them to have a plan for moving the language forward and Google were not happy. They’ve stopped contributing to Clang and now Clang lags behind GCC and MSVC for C++20 features, which means that tooling that relies on Clang is also behind.
Blow is notorious for taking a long time to finish projects. I have been seeing plugs for Carbon. Haven’t looked at it yet though. I guess it’s anyone’s guess what will happen with C++. It seems that lots of people are looking to replace it. If it happens I think it will take a long time though.
Looks like the ultimate beginner programming book to me:
Introduction to Computing Systems: From Bits & Gates to C/C++ & Beyond 3rd edition
It starts with digital fundamentals, on to hardware concepts, through basic assembly programming for an ISA called LC-3, covering fundamentals of C, finally covering some useful parts of C++. The goal of the book is a bottom up approach to learning programming, so the other topics supporting high level programming aren’t going to to be in great depth. But if they are covered adequately for the goal, it could be a nice approach. Who knows whether the book is actually good or not, but it was recommended by an unrelated author of another highly recommended book on his web site.
I read the available preview on amazon (table of contents is somewhat truncated) and then gawked at the price. Did a quick search and it came up on McGraw Hill’s site for $0.01 + shipping and there is a less truncated table of contents there. At that price I’m sure I can learn something useful from it, if it shows up. Link saved if anyone is interested.
The only other book I have seen of this nature is: The Elements of Computing Systems
That one is more about understanding a very simplified machine and os model, and you need to have progamming under your belt first. And everything around it looks like a confusing mess to me, i.e., website and many broken links, Coursera courses, not so active forum with a number of seemingly confused users.
And that’s a rental. The other price there is ‘loose leaf’, which is just printed and punched paper for a binder. Messaged.
And my mistake on the table of contents being truncated on amazon. Either I viewed it wrong the first time or something happened with rendering the preview.
During the Reddit moderator walkout, a new instance of Lemmy was created for programming. It’s the ‘fediverse’ so interacts with other instances of any software that supports the protocol:
Link saved if anyone is interested.
The other price there is ‘loose leaf’, which is just printed and punched paper for a binder. Messaged.