The repository was first open sourced 2 years after the acquisition. Nothing has changed about the project’s goals. We are working on the Linux port now. It’s currently our top priority.
Those interested can go look at all of the actual code I’ve written using these techniques, and decide for themselves whether or not it’s practical only for “simple sub tasks or basic CLI tools”:
Are you out of your mind? LLMs will require much more debugging, not less.
Separately, I have no idea which “senior developers” you know, but with or without LLMs, debugging is an immensely important part of development across the industry.
There are certainly issues (it’s in alpha after all—this was meant to be more of a soft launch, but it then kind of blew up), but I don’t think anything you listed would qualify as “jank”, and rather your unfamiliarity with the system or non-standard/idiosyncratic designs? That doesn’t apply to the “underline to hint @ shortcut” point, which has been a standard Windows UI principle since, well, before I was born…
But for instance, there are visible controls—they are available via a central command layer which fuzzy matches virtually every operation available in the debugger. This lister also in-place allows rebinding of any command. The panels don’t disappear when empty to avoid janky consequences that arise in traditional docking systems, like DearImGui’s & others. Panels and tabs are completely orthogonal. I plan to introduce a more familiar docking system which offers, in effect, fast paths for the more granular panel/tab operations.
But the overarching reason why I chose a from scratch UI layer is because DearImGui leads to more janky results and is much less-suited for the ambitions of the frontend. I don’t think the frontend would be nearly as solid had I chosen a different route.
> this was meant to be more of a soft launch, but it then kind of blew up
Congrats and/or sorry. Lots of people definitely following this project closely and with great excitement!
> I don’t think anything you listed would qualify as “jank”, and rather your unfamiliarity with the system or non-standard/idiosyncratic designs
The line between unfamiliar and jank is awfully fuzzy! I'm always willing to try new things. Always a learning curve. But definitely felt a little lost and confused at a few things. Knowing about F1 helps a lot. There's no Detach option in the toolbar!
I also had issues with std::string not showing any value in the debugger. VS2022 and RemedyBG show the string just fine.
> That doesn’t apply to the “underline to hint @ shortcut” point, which has been a standard Windows UI principle since, well, before I was born…
Maybe it's a 4K rendering issue? The underlines are kindar fubar. Too high in the "descender area". And doesn't render wide enough. I mean look at those sad little pixels on Step Into! https://i.imgur.com/gasiauv.png Or how the underline on "Registers" makes the R look like a B. https://i.imgur.com/UnnIeAT.png
There's a lot of weird font spacing issues that kinda just make a lot of things hard to read.
Not, uh, that this matters at all in the grand scheme of things!
Amusingly I went to look for examples of how the underlines are rendering in other tools and... I couldn't find one? TIL this may not be a thing anymore? Whoa. (Windows 11)
> But the overarching reason why I chose a from scratch UI layer is because DearImGui leads to more janky results and is much less-suited for the ambitions of the frontend. I don’t think the frontend would be nearly as solid had I chosen a different route.
Dear ImGui definitely has it's "look". But RemedyBG is pretty slick and I'm not sure this is ultimately going to provide any significant capabilities other than a better visual style? Could be wrong! Look forward to seeing your ambitions realized!
A fair point on the title! I think you can see it from both perspectives. When I chose the title, I was thinking of "untangling" in this sense: In the traditional C program that overuses malloc/free, you end up in a forest of dynamic lifetimes all "tangled together". So, arenas are useful in "untangling those", in the same way that you might untangle cables for your PC by bundling them together.
I don't think you intended to create that impression, but I didn't go looking for it either. It's created by phrasing like
> In this post, I’ll be presenting an alternative to the traditional strategy of manual memory management that I’ve had success with: the arena allocator.
and
> My approach, on the other hand, is this: instead of assuming that malloc and free were the correct low-level operations, we can change the memory allocation interface...
Together with a complete absence of any reference to the history of the technique or any of the people besides you involved in its development.
It's not an accusation, but it's a clarification worth making as I genuinely think someone without knowledge of the subject could come away thinking you were presenting your own innovation.
Yes, although there are debugging techniques you can use to mitigate the issue. For instance, in debug builds, upon popping off an arena, zero all popped pages, and mark them as no-access.
You are exactly the kind of person the intro was intended to filter out. Congratulations on your tantrum.
> But not our Great Prophet Author. He knows the world is a Simple Place where Government Bad and Garbage Collection Bad and Universities Bad and Everyone Else Stupid and Everything Is Easy If You're Not An Idiot and Nothing Changes and Users Are Stupid and Programmers Are Stupid and Educators Are Stupid and everyone's just making everything way too hard and if only people would listen to his rants then they'd stop being so stupid.
Yes.
> And this angry asshole is asking for subscriptions!?
The main problem with being an arrogant, condescending, narrow-minded asshole who thinks the world is a simple place and you're smarter than everyone else is actually ironically rather simple: you're wrong. About so, so, so many things in this world. And the problem with being proud of it, as you clearly are, is that you deprive yourself of the chance of ever being any less wrong.
But you go on intentionally filtering out professional software engineers with over a decade of experience if they have even the slightest difference of opinion about the subjects you write about. Clearly they have nothing to offer you: you already know everything anyway.
> Clearly they have nothing to offer you: you already know everything anyway.
I definitely don't know everything, and I am always learning from real professionals with real experience. But it's certainly true that you don't have anything to offer to me.
