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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: February 26th, 2024

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  • You know, as a full-time Linux user, I think I rather have game developers continue to create Windows executables.

    Unlike most software, games have a tendency to be released, then supported for one or two years, and then abandoned. But meanwhile, operating systems and libraries move on.

    If you have a native Linux build of a game from 10 years ago, good luck trying to run it on your modern system. With Windows builds, using Wine or Proton, you actually have better chances running games from 10 or even 20 years ago.

    Meanwhile, thanks to Valve’s efforts, Windows builds have incentive to target Vulkan, they’re getting tested on Linux. That’s what we should focus on IMO, because those things make games better supported on Linux. Which platform the binary is compiled for is an implementation detail… and Win32 is actually the more stable target.













  • I would argue that because C is so hard to program in, even the claim to machine efficiency is arguable. Yes, if you have infinite time for implementation, then C is among the most efficient, but then the same applies to C++, Rust and Zig too, because with infinite time any artificial hurdle can be cleared by the programmer.

    In practice however, programmers have limited time. That means they need to use the tools of the language to save themselves time. Languages with higher levels of abstraction make it easier, not harder, to reach high performance, assuming the abstractions don’t provide too much overhead. C++, Rust and Zig all apply in this domain.

    An example is the situation where you need a hash map or B-Tree map to implement efficient lookups. The languages with higher abstraction give you reusable, high performance options. The C programmer will need to either roll his own, which may not be an option if time Is limited, or choose a lower-performance alternative.










  • Haha, sure thing!

    So, today, TurboPascal isn’t a very popular programming language anymore. But that’s okay! We have new programming languages nowadays. Some of the popular languages that we use today include JavaScript, TypeScript and CSS. You don’t need to know much about these languages, except that they’re commonly used for creating websites and apps that run on the web.

    Now, assume you want to create a website or a webapp, and you were to learn these languages for that purpose. In that case you have quite a learning experience ahead of you, which is great! Learning can be fun! But what’s not so great is that these languages have lots of room to make mistakes. Now, everyone makes mistakes, that’s just a fact of life, but when mistakes can be avoided, that’s generally preferred.

    This is where Biome comes in: It is a tool – we call it a linter – that helps you to detect many kinds of common mistakes. It can show you where these mistakes are, and sometimes even fix them for you. It can also show you possible mistakes, things that are not necessarily a mistake, but things that look suspicious.

    And on top of that, Biome offers you another tool: It’s called a formatter. When you write your code, it automatically takes care for you that the code looks consistent. So it fixes things like indentation and other use of whitespace for you, as well as where to place your parentheses and stuff like that.

    Together, hopefully these two things can make your programming experience a little bit more enjoyable. Cheers!