- I'm not at all against a new model providing a more solid foundation for a new OS, but it's not going to be garbage collected, so the most popular of the newer languages make the pickings slim indeed.
> But the ongoing CVE pressure is never going to go away.
I think there are other ways to deflect or defeat that pressure, but I have no proof or work in that direction, so I really have nothing but admittedly wild ideas.
However, one potentially promising possibility in that direction is the dawn of immutable kernels, but once again, that's just an intuition on my part, and they can likely be eventually defeated, if only by weaknesses in the underlying hardware architecture, even though newer techniques such as timing attacks should be more easily detected because they rely on being massively brute force.
The question, to me, is "Can whittling away at the inherent weaknesses reduce the vulns to a level of practical invulnerability?" I'm not hopeful that that can occur but seeing the amount of work a complete reimplementation would require, it may simply be the best approach to choose from a cost-benefit analysis perspective where having far fewer bugs and vulns is more feasible than guaranteed perfection. And, once again, such perfection would require the hardware architecture be co-developed with the OS and its language to really create a bulletproof system, IMO.
- That's a fair point that I hadn't considered. I was developing C+objects as C++ was first being released in the mid-90s, and then using Borland's C++ compiler in the early 2000s, but never really thought about it as anything more than what its name implies: "C with some more abstractions on top of it".
Thank you for the correction, but I consider C++ to be just a set of abstractions built upon C, and, if you think about it, and none of those structures are separate from C, but merely overlaid upon it. I mean it is still just ints, floats, and pointers grouped using fancier abstractions. Yes, they're often nicer and much easier to use than what I had to do to write a GUI on top of extended DOS, but it's all just wrappers around C, IMO.
- Because programmers are creating the abstractions, not the programming language.
And there is no OS I'm aware of that will threaten Unix's dominance any time soon.
I'm not against it, but C's being so close to what microprocessors actually do seems to be story of of its success, now that I think about it.
I personally haven't written in C for more than a half-decade, preferring Python, but everything I do in Python could be done in C, with enough scaffolding. In fact, Python is written in C, which makes sense because C++ would introduce too many byproducts to the tightness required of it.
I was programming C using my own object structuring abstractions as C++ was being developed and released. It can be done, and done well (as evidenced by curl), but it just requires more care, which comes down to the abstractions we choose.
So, I would say "eclipsed" is a bit strong a sentiment, especially given our newly favorite programming langauges are running on OSes written in C.
If I had my druthers, I'd like everything to be F# with native compilation (i.e. not running using the .NET JIT), or OCaml with a more C-ish style of variable instantiation and no GC. But the impedance mismatch likely makes F# a poor choice for producing the kinds of precise abstractions needed for an OS, but that's just my opinion. Regardless, the code that runs runs via the microprocessor so the question really is, "What kinds of programming abstractions produce code that runs well on a microprocessor."
I've never thought of this before, thanks for the great question.
- Indeed. And congrats on your daughter's craftiness and how it intersects with math.
Our daughter is not so much into the pure math side but loves to do amigurumi, which is really applied 3D modelling. A craft show she wants to do later in the year doesn't allow the use of other people's models, so she is having to design her own. It's so very impressive, and she gets so much joy from seeing kids really, really want her work, as they do. It's math, modelling, color matching design, and understanding the kinds of threads all rolled up into one, so to speak :-)
- > That being said, I would not want this sentiment formalized in code guidelines :)
Surely. I'm all for code formatting standards as long as they're MY code formatting standards :-)
Ideally, I'd like the IDE to format the code to the user/programmer's style on open, but save the series of tokens to the code database in a formatting-agnostic fashion.
Then we could each have our own style but still have a consistent codebase.
And, I should add that my formatting conventions have gotten more extreme and persnickety over the years, and I now put spaces on both sides of my commas, because they're a separate token and are not a part of the expression on either side of it. I did this purely for readability, but I have NEVER seen anyone do that in all my decades on the internet reading code and working on large codebases. But I really like how spacing it out separates the expression information from the structural information.
It also helps me deal with my jettisoning code color formatting, as, as useful as I've found it in the past, I don't want to deal with having to import/set all that environmental stuff in new environments. So, I just use bland vi with no intelligence, pushing those UI bells and whistles out of it into my code formatting.
And, I fully endorse whatever it takes for you to deal with JS, as I have loathed it since it appeared on the scene, but that's just me being an old-school C guy.
- > Because your ideas are not deep nor are they connected to anything.
I didn't realize you were are the authority.
Or is it that you don't realize that you're not the authority?
I know the answer to these questions, and why your ego is telling you what you are relaying to me.
You have nothing but weak ad hominems.
> You can’t post stuff on the internet comparing yourself and your ideas to great minds and then expect people to politely ignore them or see if they can be used to expand their world view.
I'm not comparing myself to great minds, I'm comparing our situations with respect to our respective status quos.
If someone were to present such ideas to me, I have no ego that would call them names and disregard their ideas out of hand. No, I would listen carefully and then decide whether their ideas were something that I should incorporate into my worldview. And I would damn sure make sure that I wasn't an asshole to them.
I don't expect anything, and I'm not going to re-read all I've written here, but I'm pretty sure I have explicitly laid that out.
> I pity you because you cannot see beyond this and will likely continue to reply anyone and everyone in the same way as long as they keep replying you.
I stopped pitying others once I stopped pitying myself 30 years ago; over time I replaced it with empathy and compassion and humble seeking. You literally have no idea the advantage that gives me over you. It is why I do not condescend to anyone. It is because I know that I am just a human being like everyone else, with my own foibles and failings, and, even if I'm better at some things than they are, I'm sure that they have things to teach me from their superior areas of expertise.
I reply to others in a uniform way because my worldview is the work of decades of work, my friend. That I love you more than you love me is why I am having this conversation with you.
> since you claim they suffer in ignorance that only you can provide.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I never said any such thing. What I provide is rare, especially here on HN, but you can find it elsewhere, you can even beg our Creator to give you the information directly as that is our highest human potential. The problem is that few people seek this kind of knowledge, and one cannot learn what one does not seek to learn.
> Compassion would dictate that you would strive for others to understand
You do not act like a person who has worked for decades to understand compassion.
You do not understand the universe, my friend. That's not condescending; that's just the plain fact of the matter.
My speaking of compassion makes many people angry. You should be asking me why that is the case, instead of telling me how much you know about something you are clearly not manifesting.
The truth is undefeatable, and my commitment to it is why I love you. And your refusal to admit that your lack of understanding is precisely why you are so angry with me explaining the truth of the matter to you.
If you are so superior in all these realms of knowledge, then why don't you just ignore me then? I know why you don't, my friend. The ego is a terrible thing and is ravaging the world in its idiotic self-righteous defense of itself. That's not me, brother. You see what you want to see when you could instead be seeing the truth. That attitude is epidemic on this Earth is is causing vast destruction and misery for many, many human beings.
It would be a lie to say that I don't know the truth of these matters, and I despise lying, so I won't. How you deal with the truth is yours alone to deal with. Maybe someday you will reach the level where you know that you know the truth instead of just thinking you do out of your self-defensive ego.
- > C lacks mechanisms to do this apart from using its incredibly brittle macro facility.
We programmers are the ultimate abstraction mechanism, and refining our techniques in pattern design and implementation in a codebase is our highest form of art. The list of patterns in the Gang-of-Four's "Design Patterns" are not as interesting as its first 50 pages, which are seminal.
From the organization of files in a project, to organization of projects, to class structure and use, to function design, to debug output, to variable naming as per scope, to commandline argument specification, to parsing, it's nothing but patterns upon patterns.
You're either doing patterns or you're doing one-offs, and one-offs are more brittle than C macros, are hard to comprehend later, and when you fix a bug in one, you've only fixed one bug, not an entire class of bugs.
Abstraction is the essense of programming, and abstraction is just pattern design and implementation in a codebase, the design of a functional block and how it's consumed over time.
The layering of abstractions is the most fundamental perspective on a codebase. They not only handle scale, they make or break correctness, ease of malleability, bug triage, performance, and comprehendability -- I'm sure I could find more.
The design of the layering of abstractions is the everything of a codebase.
The success of C's ability to let programmers create layers of abstractions is why C is the foundational language of the OS I'm using, as well as the browser I'm typing this message in. I'm guessing you are, too, and, while I could be wrong, it's not likely. And not a segfault in sight. The scale of Unix is unmatched.
- All his ideas are fantastic, and are obviously the result of long experience in a seasoned and highly successful project. He is sharing techniques that simply work for large, complex codebases. Ignore them at your peril!
Specifically, though, these sections are related, in my experience:
> Avoid "bad" functions
> Buffer functions
> Parsing functions
> Monitor memory function use
These related aspects are why I tend to wrap many library functions that I use (in any language environment) with my own wrapper function, even if it's to just localize their use into one single entry/use point. That allows me to have one way that I use the function, thereby giving my code a place to not only place all best practices for its use, but to allow me to update those best practices in one single place for the entire codebase. And it is especially helpful if I want to simply rewrite the code itself to, for example, never use scanf, which I determined was a necessary strategy many, many moons ago.
Now, when a single function needs to accomodate different use cases and doing such separate kinds of logic would incur too much logical or runtime cost, a separate wrapper can be added, but if the additional wrappers can utilize the cornerstone wrapper, that is the best, if feasible. Of course, all these wrappers should be located in the same chunk of code.
For C, especially, wrapper functions also allow me to have my own naming convention over top of the standard library's terse names (without using macros, because they're to be avoided). That makes it easier for me to remember its name, thereby further reducing cognitive load.
- The reality is that we spend FAR more time reading code than writing it. That is why readability is far more important than clever, line saving constructs.
The key to further minimizing the mental load of reacquainting yourself with older existing code is to decide on a set of code patterns and then be fastidious in using them.
And then, if you want to want to be able to easily write a parser for your own code (without every detail in the spec), it's even more important.
And now that I have read TFA, I see he wrote:
> We have tooling that verify basic code style compliance.
His experience and dilligence has led him to the mountaintop, that being we must make ourselves mere cogs in a larger machine, self-limiting ourselves for the greater good of our future workload and production quality.
- > Your position offers no predictions, offers no implications, and offers no way to be measured in any way.
That's fair, but I didn't say that I could offer any of that. All I offered was an explanation of the situation, specifically with respect to why only 1/6th of the mass of the universe can be accounted for, yet has been calculated rather accurately by measuring the inertial forces of distant galaxies.
> They may be interesting to some people, but if you want to think about them as physics, you need to provide a prediction.
I'm sorry, but I don't need to do anything, and I couldn't even if I wanted to as it's way out of my area of expertise. I'm merely explaining the situation. It's up to actual physicists to figure out how this situation can be testable, if indeed it can be.
I'm also not putting any responsibility on anyone else. I shared these ideas with people who have no clue whatsoever where all this dark matter is. The universe itself provided this clue to y'all. I don't care if anyone believes it or tries to utilize it at all.
The reality is that with all major advancements in science, someone comes up with a "crazy" idea -- Boltzmann, Gaileo, Copernicus, Einstein, Newton -- and then theories are constructed around it, experiments are devised, and then the theories and experiments are iterated until the details are hammered out.
If I was a physicist, I would know that no one on Earth has a single clue where all this dark matter is, so maybe I would take a random "crazy" idea and stir it around in my head and see if it could be helpful, see if it could be used to tweak an equation or dynamical system description or something.
That's the extent of my thinking about this, and is the fullness of my purpose in my sharing this with y'all. That no one (or very, very few people) in science understands that this informatic universe can be queried directly means that I had no hopes of anything coming of this. I offered a gift and if no one is interested, I really don't care; I made a good intention, and tried to explain the situation as best I could. That is all I am capable of doing in this realm, so I'm at peace with the entire situation. No one here could possibly disappoint me because I expected nothing.
Peace be with you. I wish you the best of luck, success and happiness in your endeavors. I didn't mean to cause anyone here any consternation, but presenting ideas -- if one is honest about reality -- cannot possibly cause anything like that, any more than Boltzmann caused Lord Kelvin and his cohort to be a bunch of brutal bullies. The truth is the truth, and that is all that really matters, and we are all each free to go our own way, and treat others however we see fit. I hope I have treated you well; please forgive me if I have spoken harshly here, I didn't mean to.
My always welcoming new ideas means that I tend to share what I have learned without hesitation. Most people are too provincial to be open-minded enough to listen to foreign ideas with grace and either politely ignore them, or, better yet, see if they can be used to expand their worldview, in whatever dimension, pun appreciated.
- > within 10 years
> within 25 years
That is "many years" in my view.
> so untrue
So you're saying his ideas were immediately accepted?
I guess that's why he was still working at the patent office for fourish years after his Miracle Year?
And I guess this is like all the other cases where new scientific theories were immediately accepted, of which you can name precisely zero, I imagine?
- > a charlatan is a person who invents what they insist is a truth and then labels all who do not believe as fools.
I completely agree, but the truth is that I am not a charlatan, nor am I a liar. A charlatan does his dirty deeds in hopes of some wrongful gain at the expense of others. My efforts here benefit me without negative effect for anyone else. That is a key indicator of a person acting solely on behalf of Love.
You are free to believe that that which you already believe is the truth, or you can learn some new truths that expand your consciousness. I am just here to plant seeds, and it makes me happy and at peace to do so.
I really don't care what you do, for only you are responsible for your choices, not me. I love you anyway, and, while I have recommendations for you that would improve your life's happiness and that of those around you, I have no ill feelings toward anyone here about how they treat me. I, unlike Boltzmann, am only responsible to the truth of love and the love of truth, not to naysayers who have yet to accept greater truths than they currently comprehend. I was once in the same situation, if not more ignorant.
As with all things human, the choice is ours, each of us, utterly freely, but within a sublime system of cause and effect that is relentlessly impersonal.
Peace be with you.
- It took many years before Einstein's ToR was confirmed by pictures of light bending around our sun during an eclipse.
Paul Dirac predicted antiparticles purely by mathematical intuition. It wasn't until later that the theory proved true, and he was recognized to be the genius that he was.
First comes the theory, then experiments are devised. Then physics gets updated.
I merely suggest these things, not because I have the math to understand how it would affect GR or QED, or even what experiments would be needed to verify them, but merely to plant the seeds of how things work to stimulate those who can do those things to think about what their ramifications might be.
That no one understands how these things can even be known, much less that they are true, is already known by me, but the truth is never beholden to the naysayers. I'm not a Boltzmann who was (sadly) bullied into suicide by the fools of his era. I don't really care if anyone believes what I say. I say these things because I love you all and maybe a few people will be stimulated to contemplate other avenues that may explain the as yet inexplicable.
And, really, y'all are out of ideas as to what or where dark matter or energy are anyway, so there is nothing for anyone to lose.
Put another way, Einstein knew what would happen to light that passed close to the sun (even though his calculations were off), but the naysayers were irrelevant, right? They, too, thought they already knew it all.
- Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Our daughter counted AK as her favorite book for years, though now I suspect she'd choose Little Women or any of the last five William Gibson books as her fav.
She's read many of these books multiple times. Of course, she's never had a reading list to do, so I'm sure it helps that she chose them on her own. She also read Langston Hughes self-collected "Best of" treasury he released towards the end of his life. And, she has just bailed on other books, like effing Wuthering Heights, ick!
A lot of people lob ad homs at me and call me names and deny what I say here, but not a single one of you can explain our tragic human situation.
We can engineer fantastic buildings, create astounding works of art, perform the most incredible feats on the soccer pitch, and yet racism, poverty, cruelty, child porn and sexual abuse, oppression, and hatred remains rampant.
From my perspective of compassion, without asking anything from anyone here, I explain our situation to boos and unhelpful naysayers.
I am quite ahold of myself, my family loves me and I am at peace and happy. Yesterday my antics on the soccer pitch made my family laugh until they ached. We are poor but have our sustenance and live within our Creator's love.
As Eugene Parker said, "Well, we'll see who falls flat." The Parker Solar Probe is now orbiting the sun, doing its science, a marvel of engineering. And an evil, hateful bastard put a bullet in the servant of love Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s head 57 years ago, simply because he claimed that Black folks were human beings.
The truth is undefeatable, though we can be killed by the hateful fools of this world. I stand with compassion and truth.