While perusing the Nim subreddit I stumbled across a post asking for an explanation of how types work in Nim, especially how Nim allocates different types on the heap and the stack. Since the answer grew pretty long I decided to post it here as well for perpetuity. What follows is a copy of my response with some additional markdown.
Whenever you call a function it creates a stack…
This site has been down for a couple of days now. In fact the entire server has been down, which probably pained me more than it did you. Reason for this is that I have various services running on this server, most importantly perhaps my private git server. I've written before how I use git to maintain this site but that is only one of the many things I do with it. Typically I will…
A while ago I read John Novaks great rant on how hard and annoying it can be to do something as simple as extending a cross-platform application with the simplest of GUIs. Or as he puts it:
You must not under any circumstance try to open a window (on the computer, I mean), attempt to change the colour of a single pixel in it, or—god forbid!—fantasise about using native (or any kind of, for the matter)…
Recently I held a presentation on functional programming at the University of Tromsø. The presentation was meant as an introduction to the concepts of the paradigm and some of the ideas behind it. It also contains a short section on how the data structures that facilitate the immutable state collections without copying everything. The entire presentation was done in one hour. As I habitually didn't write any notes for what I was going to say…
A while back I got myself a second hand Surface Pro 1. It's a great device, and with a little tweaking I got it running Linux just fine. At first I started out with what I was currently using as the operating system on my main machine. Keeping all my machines running the same Linux flavour makes setting them up and maintaining them easier, not to mention that I don't have to remember which programs…