If you want something pretty generic and easy, check out WASM's SIMD. They limit things to 128 bit widths and common operations so it can work across generic WASM targets rather than be the most efficient on x86 specifically or something.

Other targets and languages have portable SIMD targets that are a bit more advanced, but I think WASMs SIMD design is the best for generically getting your feet wet.

Names for C successor languages are pretty well exhausted by this point, so I sympathize, but I strongly associate the name C* with a decade-old rant about C compilers’ aggressive exploitation of undefined behavior: https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/kps2015/proceedings/KPS_20... . (In calling it a rant I don’t mean that it’s altogether unpersuasive. Its style is just a bit spicier than I am used to seeing typeset in Computer Modern.)

I am bad at recognizing LLM writing off the bat, though I am getting better. It's pretty common that the writing is good enough to get me reading on a topic I am interested in; then, once I am invested in the piece, it turns out to be shallow, wildly incomplete, or simply wrong.

It's common enough that it's training me to recognize and recoil from AI tics through sheer classical conditioning.

Deliberately so, and for an Internet standard correctly so. I know there is a long tail of environments, so I am curious. What's your environment like that you need traffic inspection but don't have full control of the clients?

We operate Critical National Infrastucture for financial services. We have a lot of regulatory requirements that probably don't apply to most organisations.

There are two angles on this. There is the rejection of the humanities in favor of science and wealth, which are good things in themselves but are not everything. But, on the other hand, what many modern humanities faculties offer is a very time-bound activism that rejects books from 500 years ago and is not interested in the permanent things.

It probably doesn't help that much of the medieval liberal arts curriculum is now taught in high school using modern textbooks, much diminishing the value of learning Ancient Greek so you can study Euclid's now 2300-year-old Elements for your Master of Arts degree.

That post salvaged the subreddit; before, it had lost its focus. When I came back to give it another try, that post had become a meme and a rallying cry, and the sub had a lot of legitimately interesting thoughts and discussion.

Windows bought into Unicode hard before Unicode expanded beyond 16 bits. The consequence is that its native strings are theoretically UTF-16, but often behave like UCS-2, allowing random halves of surrogate pairs. Windows APIs reflect that, Windows filenames reflect that, and translation into UTF-8 has to reflect that -- somehow. It's not great.

Personally I'd like a world where Unicode gave up all the compromises that come with supporting UTF-16. But presumably burning all your early adopters is not a winning strategy.

> But presumably burning all your early adopters is not a winning strategy.

This topic is so old that most early adaptors probably have retired by now ;)

Fair. If only they'd retired those APIs, too.

I remember when Windows gained experimental support for a UTF-8 locale usable with its 8-bit APIs. I used to run it at work; it had some issues at first, but most got shaken out pretty quickly. I don't know its current state, but that's probably the best route to UTF-8 on Windows if MS would lean into it.