Looks believable that they are indeed the devs behind the project, but it's weird to post stuff like that to... reddit? They have a site for the project, why not post there?
> New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machines boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs.
This sounds pretty cool. I have a couple of old DELL 630s that were automotive diagnostic computers, due to them being the last model with a real hardware serial port. Now I am thinking of reviving them with Linux, but just to host old windows VMs (all the auto diag software is windows only). Maybe I should give netbsd a try here.
> If you want to code by hand, then do it! No one's stopping you. But we shouldn't pretend that you will be able to do that professionally for much longer.
Bullshit. The value in software isn't in the number of lines churned out, but in the usefulness of the resulting artifact. The right 10,000 lines of code can be worth a billion dollars, the cost to develop it is completely trivial in comparison. The idea that you can't take the time to handcraft software because it's too expensive is pernicious and risks lowering quality standards even further.
If you are a bank or a bookmaker or similar you may well want to have total control of physical access to the machines. I know one bookmaker I worked with had their own mini-datacenter, mainly because of physical security.
I am pretty forward-thinking but even when I started writing my first web server 30+ years ago I didn’t foresee the day when the phrase “my bookie’s datacenter” might cross my lips.
It looks like that if you want logically separated commits from a chunk of programming you have done. Stage a file or a hunk or two, write commit message, commit, rinse and repeat.
Absolutely: for all meaningful work I prefer small, logical commits using git add -p or similar, both for history clarity and for reviewer sanity.
In initial “spike” or hack sessions (see early commits :)), it’s sometimes more monolithic, but as the codebase stabilized I refactored to have tidy, atomic commit granularity.
I welcome suggestions on workflow or PR polish!
> C# doesn't depend on a VM these days when it is AOT compiled
Maybe I’m being pedantic, but this is an oxymoron. Also the premise is incorrect. It’s not like the VM is gone. Merely baked into the code at compile time. It compiles IL to native code. Same for IL2CPP. The VM is still there.
The term “virtual machine” is confusing. I think you meant to say JIT compiler :-)
The trouble with that level of pedantry is that you then can point to LLVM as a VM and say that Clang and other C/C++/Rust tools that AOT through LLVM are "too tied to a virtual machine". Then you can go back through the history of cross-platform optimizing C/C++ compilers and find VMs in the design in almost all of those, too. LLVM is not hiding it in its very clear name, but low-level VMs were a thing for decades before someone named LLVM.
VMs have a long history in cross-compilation, even for "low-level" languages like C/C++. The AOT versus JIT distinction is blurry, and the "VM language" versus "non-VM language" boundary is blurrier still, especially when you take into account "standard runtimes" such as glibc and vcrt and whether or not those are statically linked.
Is a C program with a compiled with Clang through the LLVM dynamically linking a glibc and statically linking a Boehm GC library "running in a VM"? There's no wrong answer, it's a lot shades of gray. I believe almost every pedantic way to answer that has an equally pedantic counter-argument.
IBM had such a culture back in the day, where they feted 1 kloc/day programmers. That was what Bill Gates sneered at with the "Measuring software productivity by lines of code is like measuring progress on an airplane by how much it weighs" quote.
I can guarantee you that there are more than a few small producers in Guangzhou that can, and are using whatever advantage they can leverage (including AI, like the rest of China's industry).
