pip

Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

Here is one thing that sucks in Rust and where Zig shines: memory allocation. Let me explain: we take memory allocation for granted, and the language APIs make it look infallible, but it isn’t. Take this: let mut v = Vec::new(); v.push(my_data); The push could fail if the system could not allocate the required memory. In Rust, this straight up aborts/panics. You cannot handle this as an error. Second, you cannot control how memory is allocated, like on the heap, arena, or your custom allocator. All data structures use one global allocator. The current Rust APIs suck. Rust does have an allocator API, but it has been in nightly for many years. Like in the above example, it becomes try_push. Whereas, all of this is first class in Zig. Every collection takes an allocator, and you can pass around the one you want. They return errors which you can handle. In a database, you want to control every aspect of memory. If there is no more free space left to allocate, we want that to become a normal error that can be returned to the caller and handled gracefully. If the database aborts/panics because an allocation failed, that is terrible - one query or one bad allocation path can take down the entire process and affect all connected clients. In Turso, we use a global allocator, and now we are working towards changing that (PR in next tweet). However, we need to add so much boilerplate code, redefine all data structures, and replace existing usage everywhere. It just sucks. This would be so sweet in Zig. A great example is TigerBeetle's codebase.

"I think I'll study up on database query planners" Every query planner paper ever:

With this kind of dominance, if we are not able to push faster growth, then it is never happening... PM Modi needs a new Reforms and Growth Ministry perhaps, one that can think out of the box!

LMAO, this came from OpenAI's chip patent. What the hell is this thing? Sama is trying to buy up all our memory