Re: Suggested method for returning a string from a C program?

On 2025-03-24, bart <bc@freeuk.com> wrote:

When you have near-instant build times then it's completely different
way of working.

Indeed, this is not just old man shaking fist at the cloud.

It turns out that there are subcultures in contemporary development that
value quasi-instant build times.

There exists a language called Dart for front-end work, which has
a framework for that called Flutter. I've never used it and don't
advocate it.

In early 2024, the Dart project announced that they were adding macros.

A year later, they announced that they are scrapping and removing
the feature:

One of the reasons?

  "Semantic introspection, unfortunately, turned out to introduce large
  compile-time costs which made it difficult to keep stateful hot reload
  hot."

  Source: https://medium.com/dartlang/an-update-on-dart-macros-data-serialization-06d3037d4f12

Turns out what that refers to is that they want update times measured in
**milliseconds*; that is, from the time a developer makes a change, to
that change being compiled, loaded in the live application and running.

I tried discussing this on HackerNews. In the uote below, A is me, and
B: is a response from an actual Dart/Flutter maintainer:

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42872693

  A> It takes seconds to minutes to make the code change, but when you hit
  A> the hot-key to deploy it to the target, it's gotta compile and upload
  A> in milliseconds?

  B> Yup! Those seconds to minutes are meaningful time well spent by the user
  B> thinking about their program and the problem. Those milliseconds are
  B> just them sitting on their thumb getting mad at the machine.

Not being entirely convinced, I retorted:

  A> You literally cannot get your thumb under your ass in milliseconds
  A> to sit on it, unless you're the Olympic record holder for that
  A> sporting event.

:)

But, the guy claims it was based on years of developer surveys,
gathering opt-in metrics, and doing various UX research.

Do you think people who work with scripting languages (or even writing
HTML) would tolerate an exasperating 12-second day between hitting Run,
and their test-run starting?

Right; see above. People doing front-end work with Flutter are
in this category.

I'm not convinced that they couldn't spare a second or two though.

According to the above source though, when developers have to wait
milliseconds, they are just sitting on their thumbs and getting
mad at the machine.

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