leah & nybbles & bytes, oh my!

a small cat caught in time's headlights

in case it's not clear from the contents of my timeline, i don't know anything about anything

see leah & tigers & bears, oh my! (npub10h8…rmmn) for
less retro/tech witterings

block early, block often,
block right wingers on sight

follow requests welcome, except
from bots

#nobot #nocops #acab
---
it's understood by every single person
who'd be elsewhere if they could -
so far so good, and life's not unpleasant
in their little neighborhood

pronouns: she/them
avatar from: cover of BYTE's Aug 80 issue
header from: Mars!

favourite instruction: ex (sp),hl

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npub14fhm8fq6muz9cytfxkd8w3wl5p2m3hk8lx7hkmw9zc88acm3546sc0kjcu

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millihertz_at_oldbytes.space@momostr.pink

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nprofile1qqs25man5sdd7pzuz95ntxnhgh06q4dcmmrln0tmdhz3vrn7udc62agprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumn0wdmksetjv5hxxmmdhg6zeh

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Published at

2024-09-17T13:56:21Z

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Last Notes

2024-09-03 04:42:53

- reply

i could say more about this - note that macro processors as part of the language (except not), and header files that are basically duplicaes of half of the source code, are reflections of both fundamental weaknesses in the language and the state of the art in softare development **half a century ago** - but... i dunno, i'm just tired

2024-09-03 04:30:14

one of the worst things about computer language development is that with a few blessed exceptions, everyone seems to think their shiny new language has to look like C to be acceptable.
C's syntax isn't magic. it's not even that well thought through; Dennis Ritchie openly regretted its declaration syntax, but apparently too late to reverse course in the way he did when he realised that writing the increment operator =+ was a mistake. (incidentally, those operators? came from it being more efficient to implement in the threaded code to which B compiled; they predated both the PDP-11 and, well, C. but they were, nonetheless, not a good idea, sacrificing clarity to terseness.) but it feels like every new language adopts it slavishly, and sprinkles its own mix of shiny sparkles on top of it.
declarations, being things that should only ever be written once, can afford to be loquacious.
for everything else, there's no excuse for writing anything but a name. let the declaration do the work.

2024-08-29 18:17:45

i think the feeling i have about rust in linux was in seeing the resignation of a maintainer earlier where they said something like "sooner or later a memory-safe kernel is going to do to Linux what Linux did to Unix" - and my overriding thought was "cool, that's the kernel you should be working on!"
if you build it, we will come. especially if it's better, but you know, some of us will show up just to check it out.
but you have to really *believe* that something can replace Linux at this point - and muscling in on Linux suggests that in fact, you really, *really* don't.
and if you don't have confidence in your shit, why should anyone else?

2024-07-04 01:13:02

- reply

maybe it's time to forget about DRAM, which in architectural terms is like using magnetostrictive delay lines for the memory in a PDP-8

2024-07-04 01:10:46

- reply

"but we can't go back to the days when computers ran in lockstep with memory! how slow would things be if we did that?!" - well, all the mitigations for speculative execution are going to slow things down to that point anyway. and hey, now that CPU speed has hit a wall even with all our architectural hacks, maybe now the semiconductor companies can go and spend the money where it really matters - on RAM that can keep up with modern processors, rather than on ensuring processors only rarely have to slow down for RAM

2024-07-04 01:05:19

it's becoming depressingly clear that speculative execution is an inherently insecure - and unsecurable - feature. it speeds single threaded systems up massively, and obliterates any hope of keeping processes safe from each other in multiprogrammed environments.