What really enabled Python to spread so much into scientific computing and AI is C/C++.
Most if not all performance critical libraries are not really Python. They just expose a Python API
I spent some time digging into the internal mechanics of process creation. It's one thing to call gcc or click 'Run', but I wanted to document the actual transition from a static binary on disk to the memory layout of a live process.
I tried to contrast the POSIX fork/exec model with the Windows CreateProcess approach. I’d love to hear from anyone who has had to deal with the more obscure parts of these system calls, like clone() flags or Windows process attributes.
Yes, and it’s almost instantaneous. You just have to check that the output achieves the prompt.
This is why some people are concerned and some have nothing to worry about. A machine can replace a street sweeper, because pushing a broom is a low skill task. The kinds of people that design or drive street sweeping machines are not the people replaced.
I wrote this because I kept seeing developers (myself included) confuse language-level isolation like Python venv with OS-level isolation like Docker. I wanted to trace the actual technical boundaries between them.
The article maps out the differences between common execution environments—from physical bare metal and VMs to containers, process sandboxes, and virtual environments—to create a mental model of where the "isolation boundary" actually sits for each tool.
TFA is missing a host of many a popular isolation techniques like Isolates, Code Interp / Binary Translators [0], Enclaves, Exclaves, Domains/Worlds, (RISC V) SEEs, TEEs, SEs, HSMs, pKVMs ...
Thanks for the feedback.
These are typical use cases where the convenience of higher level abstractions may be less important than the benefits of direct access to the hardware.
It also has weird definitions. Is nix a virtual environment? Is homebrew a virtual environment? Why is a sandbox different to a container? Type-1 vs Type-2 hypervisors are quite different, and there's no discussion about processes vs threads.
I don't know what it is about LLM-generated text, but when I read it I cannot understand the meaning it is trying to convey. The words are all there, but it is fatiguing to repeatedly parse phrasing like "it's not X but Y" and "you aren't just X, you are Y". The entire article is organized as a sequence of these statements, and this is not hyperbole.
Because it is statistical. It has no understanding of the purpose of writing which is to convey information. It can only show you the statistically most likely text, although very good sometimes, it also has its limitations.
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