I've seen boilerplate be brought up as an argument very frequently and I keep wondering, what sort of boilerplate do you deal with that it is a considerable time sink?
I feel like most languages and frontend frameworks have a pretty established template project which gets you going as far as boilerplate goes.
When it comes to backend it's more of the same.
When it comes to gamedev, you have established game engines which cut down on the boilerplate process. If you are writing your own engine in something like Vulkan which require a lot of pre-game ritual, there are still plenty of template projects to get you started, but they are more surface level than the frontend/backend examples due to the nature of the project.
If you are working on popular hardware, like arduinos, esp32s, there are established template projects for most languages.
And if you are working on a niche language or framework for which this doesn't apply, then roughly by the second project in them you'll find yourself just copying over the boilerplate from the first.
So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?
99% of most projects is boilerplate. For instance let's say I'm making a video game and I want to add multiplayer. Well, most of the networking code is going to deal with deciding what protocol I will be using (UDP likely) what the packets are going to look like (basically just pushing simple data frames over the wire) and then messing around with writing a UDP reactor (probably epoll backed) to actually get my game to run. This _essentially_ is pointless boilerplate, because you need to mess around with looking up kernel intricacies, how you're supposed to wrangle UDP packets, what the kernel expects what some pointless spec written 50 years ago says (oh no if a UDP packet arrives while the other end has closed connection according to RFC whatever you MUST(!!!!) stop reading otherwise UB occurs). If you want to ignore all this now you need to find some library, hoping it work (it won't) and trying to wrestle it to work in your engine. I do _not_ care about any of this. What I do care about is how my multiplayer game is going to run, how players are going to interact with each other etc. LLMs allow you to focus on that.
as somebody who does now do 95% of my coding without typing, I wonder the same thing. I've also seen that thrown around and I keep wondering who these people are who are spending so much time and/or effort on boilerplate to the point where they see that as the biggest benefit (??)
It depends on what you consider boilerplate. Unity, Godot, or Unreal cut down on "boilerplate" for alot of things, but they also leave a lot to the developer unless you are aiming for an asset flip.
For me, boilerplate isn't scaffolding out getters and setters, or deferring to templated code generation; using refactoring tools that have been baked into IDEs or third party tools have been available for about 20 years deal with all of those nicely.
On the other hand, the "boilerplate" to stand up a secure web service with appropriate monitoring and scaling capabilities is a fair bit of work when you know that the immediate first users are enterprise businesses.
Building a service that meets or exceeds industry compliance requirements (internal or otherwise) is a lot of work! My harness, skills, and SOPs are set up such that if I spin up a new web-dev project, it gets all of the accessibility, internationalization, observability, authentication and authorization capabilities I would expect, appropriate to the tier. There is a lot of work done to build and implement those at the front end of a project, which I could skip over for experimentation, but for actual, deliverable work, it is a huge accellerator. In addition, by having that scaffolding and boilerplate in place, and a few skills and SOPs to support future feature growth, the agentic coding tools build with them in mind, and wire everything up as they go.
It doesn't replace the need to do the testing and validation, but it sure does break me out of the cycle of "fuck it ship" that takes over when I have my developer hat on, and the "holy shit, burn it all down and start over" that takes over when I put my security engineer hat back on.
I miss the days when tech people were copyright skeptics. Remember when everyone was upset with Disney for our perpetual copyright regime and the destruction of public domain?
Now many tech people are copyright maximalists and 100% converted to the church of Disney. It’s depressing.
I don't think that's right. The problem is that Anthropic is hoarding it and that's hypocritical. If copyright doesn't count for Anthropic, they should publish Claude. If they wanna hide Claude behind copyrights and/or TOS, they don't get to screw with other people's copyrights and TOS and then profit from it.
To call that opinion "copyright maximalist 100% converted to the church of Disney" is, at the very least, hyperbole.
I have a feeling that comparing a safe, sustainable energy source to large language models is disingenuous. If you support LLMs and the field, you can just state it outright, without insincere comparisons.
If you oppose LLMs and the field because of pure irrational instinct, like those people in the past, you can just state it outright, no need for complicated arguments.
Yeah, that's also fine. However I am personally willing to side with the group which's arguments for the cause are environmental and societal impact over the one which's rebuttal to that is the fact we were wrong once 40 years ago. That's just me though.
This train of thought is hilariously rife with selection bias.
There is an infinitely long list of technologies that "Luddites and doomers" tried to block and were thankfully successful in doing so.
CFCs and ozone.
Leaded gasoline.
Thalidomide.
Offensive bioweapons.
I'm not claiming Luddites and doomers are always or usually right (they're often wrong), but your claim they were wrong every time is just total epistemological failure on your part.
The point the post you replied to is making is that while you get value out of it, and in your case it's not that expensive, it's just simply not the case worldwide
There's not much Letterboxd does that cannot be federated. For one, their metadata database is a near full replica of TMDB, with very minor exceptions such as retaining deleted TMDB media. I'm not opposed to Letterboxd dying if it means people consider an alternative that is less fragile.
The value of many platforms is not the database or the stack, but the community on it. People use Letterboxd because their friends are there and because actors and directors have their lists and ratings there.
It's slower. Wasm32 can just reserve 8 GiB (32-bit pointer + 32-bit offset) of the virtual address space from the OS for each memory, so checking for out-of-bounds memory accesses imposes no performance penalty. Wasm64 can't do that, so each memory access is a bit slower.
Oh that's interesting, never noticed it in my experience but I have never written anything in wasm where it would matter. Makes perfect sense now that I think about it though. Thanks!
Sometimes I wonder whether it's possible to run the wasm code in a separate sandboxed process to eliminate a lot of checks. I mean optionally, because normally JS calls wasm code synchronously in the same address space. The bridge will add more latency when there is a transition between JS and wasm. It's obviously complicated because some data structures can also be shared, such as SharedArrayBuffer.
> The bridge will add more latency when there is a transition between JS and wasm.
This would be similar to how NaCl/PNaCl communicated with the JS side (via message passing), and that really sucked and would also be prohibitively slow for talking to 'high frequency APIs' like WebGL2 or WebGPU (or the DOM heh).
You don't need 4GB and it wastes memory to make pointers twice as big? Even Linux supports running 64-bit code in a 32-bit address space ("x32 ABI") for this reason.
TL;DR: wasm64 has slower memory load/store operation because it requires 'software bounds checking', so unless you absolutely need more than 4 GB RAM, wasm32 is the better choice.
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