social.omar.website

it's funny how this is one of the most jarring initial things about writing Verilog, that you right-size your integers to very weird specific numbers of bits, there's no built-in system word size like 16 bits or 32 bits or 64 bits to snap to

also reminds me of
- (my sketchy impression of) programming with dependent types or contracts, where you specify bounds on how big stuff is & what goes in and out of functions
- programming in C, where you usually build your software out of fixed-size arrays of 10 or 100 or 1024 or whatever -- again, encoding an expectation of the scale of your data -- because making dynamic structures is so bespoke and annoying

& this, on the value of hard-coded limits in data structures: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35212434)

@omar guy hit the hardcoded limit in his commenting subroutine

@omar reminds me of an old common lisp mailing list thread where they crucified a guy for advocating the value of abstract data structures — so the concrete implementation of the hashmap would change to one efficient for the number of keys it has