What are some of the other problems with rwlocks? I genuinely ask because I used them with quite good success for pretty complicated use-case at large scale and very high concurrency.
Mostly that if you actually have both readers and writers, they obstruct each other; this is often undesirable. And you have to pick some bias in advance. You can get priority inversion because readers are anonymous.
I have as well. I find RW locks much easier to use than, say, a recursive mutex. Mainly since it took me a long time to actually understand how a recursive mutex actually works in the first place. When you want to use only the stdlib, you aren't left with many choices. At least in the STL.
Why would you go and work for a company that markets itself in the blog post that they just managed to automate a substantial part of the software engineering work?
However, it is also light on material. I would also like to hear more technical details, they're probably intentionally secretive about it.
But I do, however, understand that building an agent that is highly optimized for your own codebase/process is possible. In fact, I am pretty sure many companies do that but it's not yet in the ether.
Otherwise, one of the most interesting bits from the article was
> Over 1,300 Stripe pull requests (up from 1,000 as of Part 1) merged each week are completely minion-produced, human-reviewed, but containing no human-written code.
I feel like code review is already hard and under done the 'velocity' here is only going to make that worse.
I am also curious how this works when the new crop of junior devs do not have the experience enough to review code but are not getting the experience from writing it.
Agents can already do the review by themselves. I'd be surprised they review all of the code by hand. They probably can't mention it due to the regulatory of the field itself. But from what I have seen agentic review tools are already between 80th and 90th percentile. Out of randomly picked 10 engineers, it will provide more useful comments than most engineers.
the problem with LLM code review is that it's good at checking local consistency and minor bugs, but it generally can't tell you if you are solving the wrong problem or if your approach is a bad one for non-technical reasons.
This is an enormous drawback and makes LLM code review more akin to a linter at the moment.
I mean if the model can reason about making the changes on the large-scale repository then this implies it can also reason about the change somebody else did, no? I kinda agree and disagree with you at the same time, which is why I said most of the engineers but I believe we are heading towards the model being able to completely autonomously write and review its own changes.
There's a good chance that in the long run LLMs can become good at this, but this would require them e.g. being plugged into the meetings and so on that led to a particular feature request. To be a good software engineer, you need all the inputs that software engineers get.
If you read thoroughly through Stripe blog, you will see that they feed their model already with this or similar type of information. Being plugged into the meetings might just mean feed the model with the meeting minutes or let the model listen to the meeting and transcribe the meeting. It seems to me that both of them are possible even as of today.
I don't know ... as of now I am literally instructing it to solve the chained expression computation problem which incurs a lot of temporary variables, of which some can be elided by the compiler and some cannot. Think linear algebra expressions which yield a lot of intermediate computations for which you don't want to create a temporary. This is production code and not an easy problem.
And yet it happily told me what I exactly wanted it to tell me - rewrite the goddamn thing using the (C++) expression templates. And voila, it took "it" 10 minutes to spit out the high-quality code that works.
My biggest gripe for now with Gemini is that Antigravity seems to be written by the model and I am experiencing more hiccups than I would like to, sometimes it's just stuck.
People's objections are not the quality of code or analysis that Gemini produces. It's that it's inept at doing things like editing pieces of files or running various tools.
As an ex-Googler part of me wonders if this has to do with the very ... bespoke ... nature of the developer tooling inside Google. Though it would be crazy for them to be training on that.
Can't argue with that, I'll move my Bayesian's a little in your direction. With that said, are most other models able to do this? Also, did it write the solution itself or use a library like Eigen?
I have noticed that LLM's seem surprisingly good at translating from one (programming) language to another... I wonder if transforming a generic mathematical expression into an expression template is a similar sort of problem to them? No idea honestly.
It wrote a solution by itself, from the scratch, with dozens of little type traits, just as I would do. Really clean code. And the problem at hand is not the mathematical, linear algebra one. I gave that example just for easier understanding of the problem at hand. The problem is actually about the high-performance serialization. Finally, I instructed it to build complex test cases with multiple levels of nested computations to really check whether we are making any copies or not. Did it in a breeze.
Not sure about the other models. I'd guess that Claude would do equally good but I don't have the subscription for other models so I can't really compare. I for sure know that the ones from the free-tier are not worth spending time with for tasks like this. I use them mostly for one-shot questions.
So yeah, I think I have a pretty good experience. Not perfect definitely but still looks like a SF to me. Even to a highly trained C++ expert it would take probably like a day to build something like this. And most C++ folks wouldn't even know how to build this.
I'm not sure I'd call it bike shedding so much as that a lot of time and effort tends to go into hard to answer questions: what to build, why to build it, figuring out the target customer, etc. A lot of times going a thousand miles per hour with an LLM just means you figure out pretty quickly you're building the wrong thing. There's a lot of value to that (although we used to just call this "prototyping"), but, that doesn't remove the work of actually figuring out what your product is.
The least productive teams I've been on, it wasn't usually engineering talent that was the problem, it was extremely vague or confused requirements.
I don't understand this example: you're taking an address of local-scope stack object, storing it into a global list, and then use this address elsewhere in the code, possibly at different time-point, to manipulate with the object? I am obviously missing something because this cannot work unless this object lives on the stack of main().
The best example I know of off the top of my head is wait_event() in Linux.
So long as the thread is guaranteed not to exit while blocked, you know its stack, and therefore the object allocated on it, must continue to exist. So, as long as there is no way to wake the thread except by kicking that object, the memory backing it is guaranteed to continue to exist until that object is kicked. You do have to somehow serialize the global data structure lookup (e.g. lock/dequeue/unlock/kick), if multiple threads can find and kick the object concurrently that's unsafe (the thread might exit between the first and subsequent kicks).
Generally that's true, even in pthread userspace: while there are some obvious artificial counterexamples one can construct, real world code very rarely does things like that.
Ok, I see, thanks for the example. Is this technique used to avoid the potential runtime performance cost because one would otherwise need to keep that object elsewhere/heap and not on a stack? Or is the problem definition something else?
It's just mechanically simpler that way. If the wakee thread dynamically allocated the object, it would have to free it after being woken: may as well let the compiler do that automatically for us.
Yep, it's a straight up error in C to return the address of a local variable from a function outside of main. Valgrind will flag this as use of an uninitialized value.
The problem is that as long as it's something where the calling function checks it immediately after the function exits and never looks again (something like an error code or choosing a code path based on the result) they often get away with it, especially in single threaded code.
I'm running into this at this very moment as I'm trying to make my application run cleanly, but some of the libraries are chock full of this pattern. One big offender is the Unix port of Microsoft's ODBC library, at least the Postgre integration piece.
I also blame the Unix standard library for almost having this pattern but not quite. Functions that return some kind of internal state that the programmer is told not to touch. Later they had to add a bunch of _r variants that were thread safe. The standard library functions don't actually have this flaw due to how they define their variables, but from the outside it looks like they do. It makes beginning programmers think that is how the functions should work and write their code in a similar manner.
> Yep, it's a straight up error in C to return the address of a local variable from a function
Sure, that's true, but nobody is suggesting returning the address of a local variable anywhere in this thread.
I'm describing putting a pointer to a local variable in a global data structure, which is safe so long as the function doing it is somehow guaranteed not to return until the pointer is removed from the global data structure.
Stop being racist. Immigrants are given the lowest level type of jobs which nobody wants to do anymore. Others are then prospering to better jobs. That's how you keep the economy growing.
Buying exactly what? Bus and taxi drivers, people working in the supermarkets, in the low cost stores, food chains, delivery services, call agent support, then the workers in the industry plants etc etc
Are you suggesting that locals are doing that type of work?
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