BatmanAoD

Okay, yeah, I was indeed reading your original reply as a criticism of one of the people involved (presumably the security researcher), rather than as a criticism of the post title. Sorry for misunderstanding.

Apparently GCC does indeed do tail-call optimization at -O2: https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Optimize-Options.html#index-foptimize-sibling-calls

But in that case, I'm not sure why the solution to the denial of service vulnerability isn't just "compile with -foptimize-sibling-calls."

...what is your point? Some software (in a language that doesn't have tail-recursion optimization) used recursion to handle user-provided input, and indeed it broke. Someone wrote to explain that that's a potential vulnerability, the author agreed, and fixed it. Who here is misunderstanding how computers implement recursion?

TypeScript is a language, and traditionally languages are considered separate from their implementations. When I first saw the headline I hoped maybe it meant a non-JS runtime for compiled TS, and I'm well aware of the difference. Yes, that would be a much larger undertaking than porting the compiler to a new language, but the headline doesn't indicate how large a project this is, and Microsoft certainly has the resources to write a new backend (even a native-code one) for the TS compiler.

I really like concave keyboards, and maybe someday I'll invest in one (I previously used a Kinesis 2 but the company kept it when I left).

But besides the brief Kinesis foray, I have used the MS Ergo Sculpt since...2014, I think. It's honestly pretty nice, especially since I don't really care about mechanical keycaps and I value portability. (The only portability downside is that I need to manually put something in the battery compartment to keep it powered off while traveling, because for some reason it has no off-switch.)

What about Julia?

It's certainly a sticking point. People complain about Rust syntax all the time.

Personally, I think its syntax is about as close to C++ syntax as it can be without inheriting some truly horrendous decisions.

Is Fortran really your favorite language?

neeeeeeerd

What's wrong with the Windows one, and/or what's better about Gnome's or KDE's?

They did consider making environment-manipulation functions atomic; the problem is that there's simply no way to guarantee that everything that can manipulate your process's environment is actually beholden to whatever atomic interface Rust provides. I could be misremembering, but I think there was even some discussion with glibc maintainers about whether this could be made safe, and the answer was basically "haha no."

What virtual desktops do you prefer? I don't find Mac OS's significantly better, and I haven't spent much time with very many Linux window managers other than i3 (and that was years ago).

Actually, it's pretty surprising to me that a small university lab is forcing a specific version of a specific OS on you.