Viewing profile — nanolith

Personally, I see these language fights as being a bit pointless. They are trying to optimize at the wrong layer. Unless one is working with a dependently typed language, which req…

There are plenty of open core alternatives that replicate the architecture and ISA. Many of these are cycle accurate. Some have been tape-out proven. Hobbyist retro-computing enthu…

How am I only now seeing that Nedry's SGI monitor had a picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer on it with a scrawled message, "Beginning of Baby Boom"? What an oddly specific Easter egg.…

Wait... wasn't it already understood that relativity influences electron orbits of heavy elements? I clearly remember being taught some of this in physics, in the mid-noughties. Fo…

I spent some time this evening beating the dungeon. It took a bit of time to get my head around the syntax, but once I found the tutorial, it clicked. The game reminds me quite a b…

If the flavors are permanently dead, it would be fitting if the grave markers included recipes for those mourning the loss of this flavor and who wish to recreate it at home.

Fair enough. I use my fiber library for cooperative multitasking, as an alternative to async I/O. It's still non-blocking, but as far as user code knows, it behaves as if it is blo…

> For example, Boost uses ucontext as part of its fiber implementation. Maybe for the incredibly slow fallback, it does. Boost context and Boost fiber has ABI support for *nix / Ma…

There is plenty of room for debate over this advice. Prefer do notation if the effects of the flow are more important than the data structure, and prefer using Applicative style if…

That's true. The only advantage of writing a driver in this case is if I wanted to add functions, such as a programmable level shifter.

I could spot the clone because I'm familiar with the form factor of the FTDI IC, and I'm familiar enough with the datasheet to spot the expected passives. I'm not too keen these da…

In libc, you can use setvbuf to change the buffering mode.

As per my original comment, these examples are only indicative that profitable endeavors can come out of these things in unexpected ways, but that's not the point of doing these th…

That is an excellent way of considering both leisure and work, and certainly, a testament to the importance of studying the humanities. Aristotle famously developed the Greek conce…

Allegedly, it was given a lower grade due to it not being a feasible business plan, in the professor's estimation. Of course, this forms part of the legend behind Fred Smith and Fe…

We need more people in this world willing to do their own thing, even if others might find it intimidating or silly. The important thing is to have fun and learn things. Compiler h…

I'm starting to. One of the libraries I've started on recently is open source. I'm still really early in that process, but I started extracting a few functions for the optimized si…

I have been formally verifying software written in C for a while now. > is that only for some problems is the specification simpler than the code. Indeed. I had to fall back to usi…

Sadly, I did not. I have the source code on an old laptop somewhere. I was disheartened when I considered productizing it and discovered just how deep of a patent tarpit I was deal…

Around 15 years ago, I built a barbecue controller. This controller had four temperature probes that could be used to check the temperature of the inner cooking chamber as well as …

The function contracts are integrated into the codebase. Bounded model checking tools, such as CBMC, can be used to check for integer UB, memory safety, and to evaluate custom user…

In C, you're correct. The problem is that, in C++, one must account for the fact that anything could throw an exception. If something throws an exception between the time that f is…

I'm living with heart failure. I have 20-30 years before I'll need a transplant, if I live a perfect lifestyle and keep my other health issues under control. Due to my other health…

I have actually argued for the use of mailing lists for corporate engineering discussions. When that becomes the medium for code review or design discussions, there's a nice stream…

If we mark any case that might be undecidable as a failure case, and require that code be written that can be verified, then this is very much sidestepping undecidability by defini…