Mastodawn

✧✦Catherine✦✧10h ago

i'm at a loss of words after reading a paper about reformatting code using an ML model that has a measured statistical quantity A_c which says how often the reformatted code behaves the same as the original

the "ideal" (their choice of words) case is 64.2%

edit: this got popular without me really intending to, so here's why i'm reading research: i want a semantic style transfer tool that can automatically format a patch "the same as the rest of the file / rest of codebase is formatted" without the rigidity involved in black or rustfmt that i find so hostile to my workflow that i refuse to use them. obviously, i want a tool that generates semantically equivalent code 100.0% of time (ignoring source locations or reading from __file__)

Irenes (many)9h ago

@whitequark compare and contrast the Extreme Programming philosophy, in which a code change doesn't count as "refactoring" unless all observable behavior is identical

✧✦Catherine✦✧9h ago

@ireneista i like how it starts with this (left) and ends with "here is a variable we think would be good here. Do you like this" (right)

✧✦Catherine✦✧9h ago

@ireneista starting with "gotofail bad" and ending with making the problem significantly worse, apparently without ever reflecting on this

Irenes (many)9h ago

@whitequark because "the thing we're promoting is incredibly dangerous, and not in fun ways" is not really the thing anyone wants to be cited for

Geoff Wozniak 7h ago

@ireneista @whitequark Now, show me the numbers on the effort to make a rule-based style file compared to this. Because I'm sure that A_c is 100.0 in that case.

✧✦Catherine✦✧7h ago

@GeoffWozniak @ireneista so the problem i'm solving is that while for C++, you have tools like clang-format which are nice and flexible, for Rust you have rustfmt which is rigid and makes your code look like ass. I do not like my code looking like ass but I am also receptive to the idea that introducing as many knobs as clang-format has into rustfmt would make it unmaintainable

Geoff Wozniak 7h ago

@whitequark @ireneista I have not had to deal with rustfmt yet. For clang-format, I work in existing projects and use (very) mildly tweaked variants of the base style for the project.

At the risk of instigating the canonical bikeshed discussion, I am a conformist formatter and have not concerned myself with modifying style all that much. But I agree that clang-format has some bizarre knobs to tweak.

✧✦Catherine✦✧7h ago

@GeoffWozniak @ireneista I view code as art so I find strongly canonicalizing formatters like black to be actively destructive. right now I use Ruff with a 300-line configuration for some of the Python code and I think there's gotta be a better way to approach this that isn't destructive

Geoff Wozniak 7h ago

@whitequark @ireneista I very much respect that.

I view code like writing and I will tweak structure and form for far too long sometimes. Layout ends up getting less of my attention.

✧✦Catherine✦✧7h ago

@GeoffWozniak @ireneista I see layout as part of the form, I guess? I write source code files in much the same way as one would write chapters in a book: somewhat self-contained, and intended to make sense when read top-to-bottom linearly and with roughly one full-displayful of contex. so if rustfmt decides to blow up a function call into 20 lines out of nowhere it very much messes with that, for example

Geoff Wozniak 7h ago

@whitequark @ireneista Well, I do have limits.

In my case I spend my time in Binutils and GCC. Do I love the GNU style? No. But does consistency help? Yes. So I demur. But I will restructure things so the single line curly braces don't take over.

✧✦Catherine✦✧7h ago

@GeoffWozniak @ireneista the awful code style is probably #2 in the list of top 5 reasons I contribute to LLVM instead of GNU tools. I should use it as a testcase for the tool I'm working on, actually

✧✦Catherine✦✧

@GeoffWozniak @ireneista awful memories of chasing down a bug in or1k binutils where .got section got somehow slightly unaligned from _GLOBAL_OFFSET_TABLE_. I never figured it out; I have since quit the company and I will mercifully never have to think about or1k again

Geoff Wozniak 6h ago

@whitequark @ireneista I was in this wonderousness today, used in one of those functions that is a few hundred lines long with nested case statements and no attempt at functional abstraction.

So perhaps I have lost any hope of making art.

https://sourceware.org/git/?p=binutils-gdb.git;a=blob;f=bfd/elf-bfd.h;h=3d2fad49aa4c4e53dbb90467e8a9d5130a9d3dcb;hb=HEAD#l3426

✧✦Catherine✦✧6h ago

@GeoffWozniak @ireneista yeah I have regretfully seen libbfd

Geoff Wozniak 6h ago

@whitequark @ireneista Sorry, I probably should have put a CW on that.