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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • I mean, as someone who hasn’t encountered these same issues as you, I found btrfs really useful for home use. The snapshotting functionality is what gives me a safe feeling that I’ll be able to boot my system. On ext4, any OS update could break your system and you’d have to resort to backups or a reinstall to fix it.

    But yeah, it’s quite possible that my hard drives were never old/bad enough that I ran into major issues…


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlKDE Vs Gnome - Heavyweight Championship
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    2 days ago

    My standard position is that GNOME is good, if you want to just use an existing workflow, whereas KDE is good, if you’re looking to create your own workflow or you’re fine with a mediocre, familiar (Windows-like) workflow.

    But unfortunately, GNOME is really disappointing in some ways. Every so often, we have someone at work accidentally using it, because it’s the default, and they always run into the same nonsense, like not being able to type a file path into the file manager, or not being able to give a name to the file they’re trying to save. These are pretty bad problems that normal users are quick to encounter. It’s a mystery to me, why these can’t be fixed, but ultimately I just tell people to install KDE and they’ve all been happy about it.









  • Yep, some code examples from the official documentation. This:

    printPersons(
        roster,
        (Person p) -> p.getGender() == Person.Sex.MALE
            && p.getAge() >= 18
            && p.getAge() <= 25
    );
    

    …is syntactic sugar for this:

    interface CheckPerson {
        boolean test(Person p);
    }
    
    printPersons(
        roster,
        new CheckPerson() {
            public boolean test(Person p) {
                return p.getGender() == Person.Sex.MALE
                    && p.getAge() >= 18
                    && p.getAge() <= 25;
            }
        }
    );
    

    …which is syntactic sugar for this:

    interface CheckPerson {
        boolean test(Person p);
    }
    
    class CheckPersonEligibleForSelectiveService implements CheckPerson {
        public boolean test(Person p) {
            return p.gender == Person.Sex.MALE &&
                p.getAge() >= 18 &&
                p.getAge() <= 25;
        }
    }
    
    printPersons(roster, new CheckPersonEligibleForSelectiveService());
    

    The printPersons function looks like this:

    public static void printPersons(List<Person> roster, CheckPerson tester) {
        for (Person p : roster) {
            if (tester.test(p)) {
                p.printPerson();
            }
        }
    }
    

    Basically, if you accept a parameter that implements an interface with only one method (CheckPerson), then your caller can provide you an object like that by using the lambda syntax from the first example.

    They had to retrofit lambdas into the language, and they sure chose the one hammer that the language has.

    Source: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/javaOO/lambdaexpressions.html


  • I always hated the implementation for .toString() of Duration. It gives you a string like that: PT8H6M12.345S (not a hash)

    Apparently, it’s an ISO 8601 thing, but what the hell am I supposed to do with that?
    It’s not useful for outputting to end users (which is fair enough), but I don’t even want to write that into a log message.
    I got so used to this just being garbage that I would automatically call .toMillis() and write “ms” after it.

    Well, and not to gush about Rust too much, but I recently learned that its debug string representation is actually really good. As in, it’s better than my Java workaround, because it’ll even do things like printing 1000ms as 1s.
    And that’s just like, oh right, libraries can actually provide a better implementation than what I’ll slap down offhandedly.



  • Yeah, I came to Rust from Scala and Kotlin, where equality is default-implemented (for case class and data class respectively, which is basically all we ever used), so this meme surprised me a bit.

    I do actually like that you can decide a type cannot be compared, because sometimes it really just doesn’t make sense. How would you compare two HTTP clients, for example? But yeah, it certainly is a choice one can disagree with.


  • I find these videos give a very visual explanation and help to put you into the right mindset: http://intorust.com/
    (You can skip the first two videos.)

    Sort of when it clicked for me, was when I realized that your code needs to be a tree of function calls.
    I mean, that’s what all code is anyways, with a main-function at the top calling other functions which call other functions. But OOP adds a layer to that, i.e. objects, and encourages to do all function calls between objects. You don’t want to do that in Rust. You kind of have to write simpler code for it to fall into place.

    To make it a bit more concrete:
    You will have functions which hold ownership over some data, typically because they instantiated a struct. These sit at the root of a sub-tree, where you pass access to this data down into further functions by borrowing it to them.

    You don’t typically want to pass ownership all over the place, nor do you typically want to borrow (or pass references) to functions which are not part of this sub-tree.
    Of course, there’s situations where this isn’t easily possible, e.g. when having two independent threads talking to each other, and then you do need Rc or Arc, but yeah, the vast majority of programming problems can be solved with trees of function calls.