Top all-time · #788
Herb Sutter
Personal blog · gotw.caprogramming
Herb Sutter writes GotW.ca Home Page, a personal blog at gotw.ca about programming. Since 2008, 84 different Hacker News readers have linked it 102 times, most often “The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software (2005)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Sometimes recommended · 6 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Herb Sutter's gotw.ca mainly for the 2005 essay The Free Lunch Is Over on concurrency and for the Guru of the Week C++ articles.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Called seminal, a nice collection of gotchas, a great little book, and detailed on const and locks.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software (2005)34 people · 38 mentions · first linked 2008-11-27
- Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Gosling interview13 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2010-02-11
- Series of C++ programming problems6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2008-04-04
- /gotw/008.htm3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-06-12
- /publications/mill02.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-02-15
- /gotw/024.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-11-05
- /publications/mill18.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-04-29
- /gotw/081.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-01-15
- Oldie but goodie: Herb Sutter's "Guru of the Week" articles on C++2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-02-05
- /gotw/066.htm2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-02-21
What Hacker News says?
These style of exploits remind me of "The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software" (2005) - http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm > Chip designers are under so much pressure to deliver ever-faster CPUs that they’ll risk changing the meaning of your program, and possibly break it, in order to make it run faster. > ... > applications will increasingly need to be concurrent i…
Comment linking /publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
on “ZombieLoad: Cross Privilege-Boundary Data Leakage on Intel CPUs”Submitted Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Gosling interview as a story · 146 points
HN discussionRight around 2002. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
Comment linking /publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
on “The 3dfx Voodoo1”Submitted The free lunch is over: a fundamental turn toward concurrency in software (2005) as a story · 115 points
HN discussion>"To the point - you could ensure that compiler can de-virtualize your usage of structure (or class if you will) by adding "nonvirtual" to every method it implements or derives." Think it in this way. Many respectable people has been making a case to avoid inheritance[1][2]. What you are proposing would actually be an incentive to them. I don't know about you but the amount of functions that I actually override in m…
Comment linking /publications/mill07.htm
on “We have C++14”Submitted Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000) as a story · 56 points
HN discussionhttp://www.gotw.ca/gotw/081.htm
Comment linking /gotw/081.htm
on “John Carmack's comment on Doom 3's code style”Submitted Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (2000) as a story · 44 points
HN discussion> Sometimes you need to. You cannot entirely stack allocate an object that uses PIMPL. You actually can, if I'm not misunderstanding: http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/028.htm
Comment linking /gotw/028.htm
on “The C++ Build Process Explained”Submitted C/C++/Java have dominated programming for 30 yrs & are at a turning point [2000] as a story · 28 points
HN discussionWell, there is a way to have them on the stack even with PImpl: http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/028.htm However I'd say it's an ugly hack which should only ever be used if you _really_ need the performance.
Comment linking /gotw/028.htm
on “The C++ Build Process Explained”Submitted The Free Lunch Is Over as a story · 23 points
HN discussionItani-who? But you won't when writing C++ unless you absolutely have to, because it's a major pita to encapsulate everything. Entire books [0] have been written about exception safety in C++. Getting it right in combination with RAII, (copy)-constructors and assignment operators is very tricky. Which touches the main issue with C++ from my experience, mixing foot guns with higher level convenience. Embedded linked l…
Comment linking /publications/xc++.htm
on “I love coding in C”Submitted The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software (2005) as a story · 8 points
HN discussionNot only disruptive to their industry, but game changing for those of us writing software. I remember reading all the hoopla over the loss of Dennard scaling 15 years ago (e.g. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm ). Intel poked along at 2 and 4 core consumer systems for so long. The argument was always "no one can use more than X cores" - but software seems to trail hardware in these examples, not th…
Comment linking /publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
on “New AMD EPYC-based Compute Engine family, now in beta”Submitted Interview with the authors of C, C++ and Java (2000) as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> I believe Java did this deliberately to avoid the trouble that C and C++ have with signed and unsigned integer types having to coexist. It did, from http://www.gotw.ca/publications/c_family_interview.htm > For me as a language designer, which I don't really count myself as these days, what "simple" really ended up meaning was could I expect J. Random Developer to hold the spec in his head. That definition says tha…
Comment linking /publications/c_family_interview.htm
on “A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 16”Submitted Oldie but goodie: Herb Sutter's "Guru of the Week" articles on C++ as a story · 5 points
HN discussionC++, rather than C, but there was a GOTW post about this years ago, which explains the situation in detail. http://www.gotw.ca/gotw/081.htm
Comment linking /gotw/081.htm
on “Why Const Doesn't Make C Code Faster”Submitted Interview with Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup and James Gosling as a story · 4 points
HN discussionWhile I don't agree with not having unsigned as part of the primitive times, and look forward to Valhala fixing that, it was based on the experience most devs don't get unsigned arithmetic right. "For me as a language designer, which I don't really count myself as these days, what "simple" really ended up meaning was could I expect J. Random Developer to hold the spec in his head. That definition says that, for inst…
Comment linking /publications/c_family_interview.htm
on “C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte”Submitted The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software (2005) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI expect that's because it was designed very well for the days of serial, in-order, static execution. But, CPUs today are all about pipelining and parallelism. Herb Sutter's "Free Lunch" has been over for longer than most people here have been writing software. http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
Comment linking /publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
on “XXH3 – a new speed-optimized hash algorithm”Submitted The Free Lunch Is Over – A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSigned arithmetic is generally only problematic when you hit the upper or lower bound. The right answer is almost never to use unsigned; instead, it's to use a wider signed type. It's far too easy to get things wrong when you add unsigned integers into the mix; ever compare a size_t with a ptrdiff_t? Comes up all the time when you're working with resizable buffers, arrays, etc. And no, Java did not choose signed by…
Comment linking /publications/c_family_interview.htm
on “The Little C Function From Hell”Submitted The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Towards Concurrency as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou are right, this has been predicted some time ago. The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software[1] from 2005 is the seminal essay on this subject. [1] http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
Comment linking /publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
on “Why have CPUs been limited in frequency to around 3.5Ghz for so many years?”Submitted C Family Interview as a story · 3 points
HN discussionEasy, > Gosling: For me as a language designer, which I don't really count myself as these days, what "simple" really ended up meaning was could I expect J. Random Developer to hold the spec in his head. That definition says that, for instance, Java isn't -- and in fact a lot of these languages end up with a lot of corner cases, things that nobody really understands. Quiz any C developer about unsigned, and pretty s…
Comment linking /publications/c_family_interview.htm
on “Show HN: My hobby OS that runs Minecraft”Submitted The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software (2005) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
