Agents that fire twice after a clock change
Daylight saving moved and two nightly agents ran again at 01:30. Is anyone normalising to UTC before scheduling, or is there a cleaner idiom?
11 replies →
Community
The list is still open
Quieter than 2002 — a few dozen messages a month — but the people answering are the people who wrote the tools. Read before you post; nobody minds a beginner, everybody minds a vague one.
Today’s messages
Reading a 2003 ODB on a modern machine
Inherited a database from a retired colleague. It opens, but half the outlines render as one long line. Encoding, or something structural?
23 replies →
Anyone still running Manila in production?
Genuine question, not a provocation. We have about 400 pages and an editorial team who like it.
37 replies →
in-place append: does it still apply?
Short answer, yes, and the measurements are in the new article. Longer answer in the thread.
8 replies →
Certificate renewal without touching the runtime
Sharing the reverse-proxy configuration we landed on. Runtime never sees a certificate now.
14 replies →
Naming conventions for public verb tables
We keep arguing about this internally. Curious what the list settled on twenty years ago.
19 replies →
No thread matches that filter yet.
How a thread reads
in-place append: does it still apply?
Yes. The optimisation is a property of how the runtime handles a string that has exactly one reference, and that has not changed. What has changed is that machines are fast enough to hide the problem until your input grows.
Concatenating 40,000 short lines the naive way moved 3.1 GB through memory. The in-place form moved 41 MB.— measured on the same machine, same build
The full write-up, with the measurement harness, is in Optimal String Concatenation in UserTalk.
Confirmed on our export job. Twelve minutes down to nineteen seconds, and the change was four lines.
Start a thread
Posting is open to members. The preview below updates as you type — the list is plain text, so what you see is what everyone gets.
…House rules
- Say what you already tried. “It doesn’t work” costs the list three messages before anyone can help.
- Include versions. Runtime, operating system, and the release of any suite involved. Behaviour differs across all three.
- Paste the actual error. Not a paraphrase, and not a screenshot of text.
- One subject per thread. If the conversation forks, start a new one and link back.
- Be decent. Disagreement is welcome; condescension is not. The list has beginners on it by design.
- No recruiting or promotion outside the monthly open thread.
- Post the answer. If you solve it yourself, come back and say how. That is what makes the archive worth searching.
Join the list
Membership is free. Subscribe with the form in the footer, or write to the editors and we will add you by hand. You can leave at any time with a single email, and the privacy policy explains exactly what we hold.