
New, much faster version of News.YC - pg
http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html#11apr07
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gibsonf1
Thanks Robert Morris & PG!

When will ARC be available (It's looking pretty exciting)? What problems are
you solving that take it beyond CL?

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ecuzzillo
I am as big an Arc fan as the next guy, but I can't say it _looks_ any more
exciting than PHP. I am highly interested in it being released, however. It
seems to me that if you're at the point where you're rewriting internals for
speed, you're at the point where it works well enough to be released. If you
just release it without any guarantees or claims about its goodness, sure you
might get bashed all over the internet, but also a lot of people would use it
and modify it for themselves, and maybe some of said improvements might be
useful to you. The YC admissions cycle is over, so maybe you have time to do
this now.

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mattculbreth
If Arc ends up looking like PHP then I think it's fair to say that Paul's
going to get bashed pretty badly indeed.

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ecuzzillo
I know Arc is way better than PHP and was even before it existed (IMO a
language that doesn't exist is better than PHP). My point in the first
sentence was that all we can _see_ of Arc is this web page, a replica of which
could be created in PHP with little or no change in the user experience.

Anyway, the bashing part would presumably be because some of it isn't
finished, or because people don't understand some of his decisions that he
didn't explain, not because the language is bad. I theorize based on what's
been written about it that Arc is a quite nice language to use, particularly
for Lispers.

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mattculbreth
Did you hear that the Inkling guys are rewriting their entire site in it? It
must be ok.

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abossy
Uhmm... that was an April Fool's joke. Not sure if you intended for there to
be sarcasm in your post.

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mattculbreth
A little too dry I guess today. It was a good April Fool's joke though.

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jey
Is arc self-hosting, a bunch of Common Lisp macros, or implemented in some
other language? How long until arc is self-hosting? :)

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ecuzzillo
It's written in mzscheme. I don't know exactly what self-hosting means, but PG
did write his own web server, and he said he very much wouldn't want to deal
with Reddit-sized traffic, so I expect he runs everything on his own
computers.

~~~
nostrademons
Self hosting = interpreter/compiler for the language written in the language
itself.

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whacked_new
I'm curious, does a 2-3x increase in speed very perceptibly better the user
experience? I can understand a 15 second to 5 second reduction. What about a 2
second to 0.6 second reduction? What about balancing by faster hardware?

(asking because it's directly relevant to me)

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gibsonf1
Before the upgrade, if you were to load a page with alot of comments, there
was a noticeable delay. That is no longer the case.

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notabel
The extra speed would have been nice yesterday, while the emails were going
out. I doubt I was the only one who noticed the site slow down as we all
refreshed compulsively. :-)

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ryantmulligan
Would it be good experience to learn Mz. Scheme as a primer before ARC is
released?

~~~
dfranke
Definitely learn a Lisp, but I doubt the release version of Arc will still use
mz.

