abseil-cpp VS learnxinyminutes-docs

Yeah, it's nice! And Abseil does it, IFF you use LLVM libc++.

https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/string...

The standard adopted it as resize_and_overwrite. Which I think is a little clunky.

This may be confusing to those familiar with Google's libraries. The baseline is the Go BTree, which I personally never heard of until just now, not the C++ absl::btree_set. The benchmarks aren't directly comparable, but the C++ version also comes with good microbenchmark coverage.

https://github.com/google/btree

https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/contai...

An implementation of call_once that accommodates callbacks that throw: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/blob/master/absl/base/c...

I wouldn't say it's that cryptic. It's just a few bitwise rotations/shifts/xor operations.

You can see hashing optimizations as well https://www.deepmind.com/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sort..., https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp/commit/74eee2aff683cc7d...

I was one of the members who reviewed expertly what has been done both in sorting and hashing. Overall it's more about assembly, finding missed compiler optimizations and balancing between correctness and distribution (in hashing in particular).

It was not revolutionary in a sense it hasn't found completely new approaches but converged to something incomprehensible for humans but relatively good for performance which proves the point that optimal programs are very inhuman.

Note that for instructions in sorting, removing them does not always lead to better performance, for example, instructions can run in parallel and the effect can be less profound. Benchmarks can lie and compiler could do something differently when recompiling the sort3 function which was changed. There was some evidence that the effect can come from the other side.

For hashing it was even funnier, very small strings up to 64 bit already used 3 instructions like add some constant -> multiply 64x64 -> xor upper/lower. For bigger ones the question becomes more complicated, that's why 9-16 was a better spot and it simplified from 2 multiplications to just one and a rotation. Distribution on real workloads was good, it almost passed smhasher and we decided it was good enough to try out in prod. We did not rollback as you can see from abseil :)

But even given all that, it was fascinating to watch how this system was searching and was able to find particular programs can be further simplified. Kudos to everyone involved, it's a great incremental change that can bring more results in the future.

Check out https://abseil.io. It offers absl::optional, which is a backport of std::optional.

> Sure, maybe for some esoteric edge cases, but 5 mins on https://learnxinyminutes.com/ should get you 80% of the way there, and an afternoon looking at big projects or guidelines/examples should you another 18% of the way.

Not for C++, and even for other languages, it's not the language that's hard, it's the idioms.

Python written by experts can be well-nigh incomprehensible (you can save typing out exactly one line if you use list-comprehensions everywhere!).

Someone who knows Javascript well still needs to know all the nooks and crannies of the popular frameworks.

Java with the most popular frameworks (Spring/Boot/etc) can be impossible for a non-Java programmer to reason about (where's all this fucking magic coming from? Where is it documented? What are the other magic words I can put into comments?)

C# is turning into a C++ wannabe as far as comprehension complexity goes.

Right now, the quickest onboarding I've seen by far are Go codebases.

The knowledge tree required to contribute to a codebase can exists on a Deep axis and a Wide axis. C++ goes Deep and Wide. Go and C are the only projects I've seen that goes neither deep nor wide.

Learn x in y minutes: Concise tutorials to learn various programming languages and tools quickly.

StackOverflow's making their own competing LLM for all this stuff.

IMO, one of the biggest problems with the way people use LLMs right now, is that they're being treated as a single oracle: to know Java, it must be trained on examples of Java.

It would be much better if their language comprehension abilities were kept separated from their knowledge (and there are development efforts in this direction), so in this example it would be trained to be able to be able to read a Java tutorial rather than by actually reading a Java tutorial, so when the overall system is asked to write something in Java, the language model within the system decides to do this by opening https://learnxinyminutes.com and combining the user query with the webpage.

I think this will help make the models more compact, which is a benefit all by itself, but it would also mean that knowledge can be updated much more easily.

Someone would have to actually do this in order to see if those benefits are worth the extra cost of having to load a potentially huge a tutorial into the context window, and likewise the extent to which a more compact training set makes the language comprehension worse.

The project was created and is maintained by Adam Bard, but is open sourced with over 1.7k contributors since 2013

https://github.com/adambard/learnxinyminutes-docs

So you have studied programming for at least 5 years, what kinds of programs have you written? Apparently you have already applied your skills, since you have "created a good reputation among developers"? Why a time-frame of 20 years, why not 20 months or 20 weeks? Heck, you can learn a lot in even 20 days!

Once you have learned a few languages, libraries and frameworks then learning new stuff becomes much easier. At that point I'd recommend to check the website https://learnxinyminutes.com. Meanwhile, continue asking questions here and elsewhere :)

An other tip, if you are into computer science and algorithms stuff I recommend you try to solve problems which are posted at https://codegolf.stackexchange.com. You don't need to try solving them in less than X characters, but just to get them solved by any means necessary. And don't take too much bad influence from the posted solutions.

If you want a brief overview, go to https://learnxinyminutes.com/ and look for Javascript. I guess it should be roughly the time it took to learn C++ or possibly less, but JS has its own quirks. Often learning a second language is difficult as the first.

Very light compared to the other resources people have linked for you, but I love https://learnxinyminutes.com/