i feel that the grammar of a programming language is among the least appropriate of all possible facets of its behavior to start off with. why on earth would i care about your preferred tokens to represent concepts which have not yet been defined
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i was thinking about this too after i learned about the caveats with side effect sequencing. i don't think there's anything terribly special about C other than i know gcc devs are genuinely sweet and thoughtful and passionate
if i wanted to make a language for the macrokernel i would have to decide to understand a lot more than i do now about what the hell a kernel is and especially boot logic. and then i'd have to learn about disk persistence.
i think as an implementation language for managing memory and cpu structures there definitely could be better frontends. and i think once i feel more comfortable about the hardware semantics (particularly x86 cpu + ssd nvme) then i will want to start gernerating structures that translate the macrokernel user API in my head to match the requirements from the hardware
like an interlocking web of formal models dancing together in the memory page prairie is actually what i see in my head when i think of the end goal
look up this paper on "model checking c source code for embedded systems" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10009-009-0106-5
- buy it for $40! thanks!
two just horrifying suggestions to purchase below that:
- A Model Checker Collection for the Model Checking Contest Using Docker and Machine Learning
- Finding software vulnerabilities in large C projects via bounded model checking
never sure how to take lines like these https://sci-hub.st/10.1007/s10009-009-0106-5
The disadvantage is that all specific knowledge of the C code and the underlying hardware has to be used in the abstraction process as the general purpose model checkers are not aware of these peculiarities.
i assumed everyone doing this sort of thing was the author of the C code they're checking and that everything of course has to be specialized to the particular CPU. i don't know what anyone would expect to get out of model checking otherwise
actually delighted to hear not only that gcc tends to be the de facto here but that CIL is compatible. CIL sounds sick
If the GCC compiler supports the chosen microcontroller, the adjustments are less costly since many of the C code model checkers use the GCC compiler or a compatible framework such as CIL for preprocessing.
yet another seemingly-legit ARPANET paper that seems like it was made to be found discarded in an abandoned laboratory https://people.mpi-sws.org/~gummadi/teaching/sp07/sys_seminar/arpanet.pdf
Attempts at computer networks have been made in the past
"but they weren't evil enough for our purposes".
dude is absolutely crashing out about "load sharing", claiming it will never be worth the cost, and computer programs are incompatible, etc. given that i know that worked for parallel scala compiles, it seemed confusing until the next section
Data Sharing:
The program is sent to a remote computer where a large data bank exists.
This type of operation will be particularly useful where data files are too large to be duplicated economically.
so our boy lawrence g. roberts totally predicted bazel cloud builds and github actions.
Access to this data base will be required simply to make an inquiry or may involve executing a complex program using the data base.
mysterious access control mechanisms? potential surveillance? it gets better:
This type of use is particularly important to the military for command and control, information, retrieval, logistics and war gaming applications.
In these cases, one command would send a program to be executed at another center where the data base existed.
i really never know if they're just saying intentionally ridiculous shit
note how he distinguishes "send a program" -- clearly an RPC call, which were definitely around at the time
fidonet did a ton of load sharing on a per-file basis, including some really interesting locality-based queueing
Program Sharing: Data is sent to a program located at a remote computer and the answer is returned. Software of particular efficiency or capability exists on certain machines.
literally this is all google tech lmao it's like he's salivating over this
The use of specialized programs at remote facilities makes possible large gains in performance.
Perhaps even more important is the potential saving in reprogramming effort.
ridiculous shit
yeah and then he mentions three separate times how scientists can use it to do new science together. it seems important that scientists are on it at all
and i found all that about DARPA salivating over people never writing their own programs again because of:
- the seL4 paper which got best paper https://web.archive.org/web/20110219113850/http://www.ok-labs.com/releases/release/open-kernel-labs-paper-on-formal-verification-wins-top-prize-at-prestigious
still think this paper is terrible. it keeps saying it made compromises for verifiability and wildly overstates the guarantees
turns out that conference SOSP is literally the (ACM) conference whose first year was when a big ARPANET thing was unveiled https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_on_Operating_Systems_Principles
there's these unstructured notes from the fucking pentagon lmao https://web.archive.org/web/20150405055923/https://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mousesite/EngelbartPapers/B1_F20_CompuMtg.html
and finally this is IETF at its best https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_resource choose the most generic possible term that sounds like page cache, but it specifically means network share
oh this is a great tidbit
Before 2023, SOSP was held every other year, alternating with the conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI);
- starting 2024, SOSP began to be held every year.
lots of weird things like this
oh then i found this guy who was at the arpanet conference http://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsbm/article-pdf/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2002.0006/911101/rsbm.2002.0006.pdf
so like this guy is easily off the charts evil imho. this is him saying he was smarter and braver than alan turing:
My few contacts with Turing were not encouraging. I wanted to talk to him about the remarkable results of his paper ‘On computable numbers’. Reading this paper I had found numerous errors in the formal specification of the universal computer. Some were trivial but others were quite subtle and I was not sure that my solutions were correct. When I came to this point, Turing became more and more agitated, until I could see that no sensible discussion was possible. Clearly he felt the errors to be irrelevant and my drawing attention to them rather foolish.
then he mysteriously advises on "cryptography" from the late 80s until he finally fucked off this planet
Retirement did not by any means imply inactivity. For the next 15 years Davies practised
as a consultant in security engineering for the financial and media industries. This was at a
time when systems based on cryptographic and similar techniques were coming into wide use
both for cash cards and pay television.
omg
Davies was very much an engineer rather than a scientist, and he was always on the lookout
for topics in which his ingenuity and insight could be deployed.
guy who steals people's ideas
