think it's fair to say performance rust is hard to write
This situation proved exactly the opposite.
They wrote a utility to pass functional tests. It did. Then people said it was too slow. So, in just a few days or hours, they dramatically sped it up while still passing the tests.
Seems like it was pretty easy to write fast Rust code in this case.
The best thing about all the C smugness here is how quickly it backfired.
Out of dozens of utilities in uutils, two were slower than the GNU equivalents. In case the logic escapes some, that means that the others were already as fast or faster. Some are multiples faster. The overall uutils suite is faster then GNU Coreutils already and will only get better. There was nothing for C fans to be smug about to begin with.
Of the two that were slower, it seems to have only taken a few days to make them faster. The article only tells us about one which is now 50% faster than the GNU version.
But the promise of Rust is not that Rust is faster anyway. It is that it is easier and safer to refactor. The actual promise of Rust is that you can address issues like performance without as much fear that you will break everything.
After the reported slowness, both of the two uutils implementations were dramatically sped up in just a couple of days or even hours. They are tested against the GNU test suite and so we know these tests are still passing. That is the promise of Rust. This example proves the Rust claims real. The C smugness did not age well.
The C versions (GNU) can clearly be sped up as well. The question is who will do that and when. Because speeding up old C code is not nearly as easy or fun. My guess is that it is going to be more than a couple days before we see headlines bragging that GNU has caught up.
The GNU Coreutils are maintained by Red Hat if we look at who contributes the code and who maintains the dev servers. They are professionally maintained. It is not a rag tag bunch of amateurs. So if uutils is already faster, it does not bode well for the C implementation.
The emotion she is expressing is fear. That it would be perceived as hate tells you a lot about the observer.
Once they get their Wayland compositor working, I would not be surprised if Steam runs on it.
Well, I certainly do not want the government making it harder for the economy to succeed at this exact moment. That is for sure.
I am not sure people understand the danger we are in. If we have a second Great Depression, the climate is going to get screwed. I promise you that.
As for EV charging standardization. The market has already done this. Tesla style chargers are now the NACS (North American Charging Standard) and pretty much all new EVs are being manufactured to that standard.
If we stopped taxing foreign EVs, ICE emissions would also take care of themselves. Predating the mass adoption of EVs seems like quite a big gift to the fossil fuel industry.
That said, no pipelines in Carney’s nation building projects. That seems like a pretty big miss if the goal was “support for the fossil fuel industry from top to bottom”.
Incredibly optimistic view that the new power would be more benevolent than the old.
The issue is mountains
I am willing to believe that “shareholder value” is less his priority than simply “the economy we all depend on”. As long as trade with the US is down 25%, we need to pull some drastic moves to keep Canada out of the poor house. I am willing to feed him some rope.
If we stay out of a recession, we can get back to a stronger stance. His track record suggests that climate is a priority for him. He did not create the Trump tariff disaster.
I share your concern about putting too much in orbit. The rest is FUD.
Terrestrial solar cannot provide 100% of the electricity. What we are talking about here is continuous base load power. The only options today are nuclear or burning fossil fuels. That is what we need to compare this to.
It is theoretically possible to generate enough terrestrial solar and to store it in batteries to provide power continuously to the grid. What would such a system look like that could provide all the energy needs for a country like the UK? Consider, there can be entire months of total cloud cover in the winter. And even the clearest months are overcast half the time. And, you know, the night.
https://weatherspark.com/y/147871/Average-Weather-at-London-Weather-Centre-United-Kingdom-Year-Round
How are we transmitting that power to where it is needed? Any losses there?
The square law is a thing but we all know there is a difference between a laser and a flashlight. And the collector will clearly be bigger than the transmitter. With advanced beam forming, microwave transmission can be very efficient. And it can be sent to wherever you need it. No other transmission losses.
As for cost, if NASA two years ago thought it would cost 61 cents per kWh, I am quite optimistic. There are many, many ways this cost will come down over time. Look at the reductions and improvements in solar overall. The input cost (the sun) is free. So we are talking about process engineering. We are good at that. But even this worst case number does not need to drop by much we we do proper accounting.
Again, the comparison here is to other alternatives for baseload power. And nobody is trying to build space solar at scale this year. This does not have to replace terrestrial solar. We should do that too, as much as we can. What we are talking about here is being able to turn off the coal plants. You don’t want that?
This comment confuses me. The goal here is to explicitly replace fossil fuels with solar.
Microwave transmission. Very clever and quite cool.
You beam microwave power to the surface where it is absorbed, converted to electricity, and added to the grid.
Microwaves can easily penetrate cloud cover and other things that block or attenuate visible light. You get predictable, continuous power generation—perfect for direct integration to the grid. No batteries.
Only during the day of course but that is when energy demand is greatest and when you do not want excess capacity.
GCC is adding cool new languages too!
They just recently added COBOL and Modula-2. Algol 68 is coming in GCC 16.