phicoh

7 ms·

31.
by phicoh 8mo ago
One issue is that Europe got caught with it pants down. It likely that Europe will keep improving its defense long after it is no long necessary from an economic point of view. Supporting Ukraine in destroying whatever Russia manages to pro
32.
by phicoh 8mo ago
The EU, well NATO has the problem what Russia will do when it is no longer at war with Ukraine. There is also the question what the US would if Russia attacks a NATO country. So European NATO countries basically need to keep supporting Ukra
33.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Russia's military force currently relies on men willing to die for money. That could change. But Putin seems reluctant to force the general population to die in Ukraine. Classic economic theory suggests that the amount you need offer t
34.
by phicoh 8mo ago
The EU is rich enough to support Ukraine for a very long time. During that time it is likely that Ukraine develops better and better weapons. This requires Russian army to improve as well. It's not clear how the Russian army will impro
35.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Yes, there is a tool called asmconv, that converts. One example is the new compiler driver that can use ACK and GCC from a single compiler driver and that can automatically convert assembler and figure out which archiver to use to create li
36.
by phicoh 8mo ago
I wonder who you are thinking of who 'wasted a couple of years'. Regular students do one course in operating systems. That is a series of lectures and some practical work. The practical work is a couple of weeks at most if you kno
37.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Converting between ACK and GCC assembler is a solved problem. Minix-vmd can be compiled with both ACK and GCC. Unfortunately, when MINIX3 as started, it was copied directly from MINIX2 and a lot of interesting stuff was left out.
38.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Yes. Absence of direct control by the government. The VU was founded for religious reasons, so the main goal was to be able to teach theology according to the particular type of protestant Christianity that the founders of the VU believed i
39.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Universities get paid for teaching and research. Any software that is produced is a by product. Producing production quality software in a university is not easy and the university has to find a way to fund it. MINIX was originally a privat
40.
by phicoh 8mo ago
The librarated part means free from government control. Until the VU all Dutch universities belonged (indirectly) to the Dutch government.
41.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Selling ACK meant money for research into distributed systems (Amoeba) and parallel programming languages. I can see that money for research is more attractive than open source. For MINIX the situation was different and I think more unfortu
42.
by phicoh 8mo ago
ACK used to be self-hosting. Of course, standard Unix utilities like sh and make are required. I still use one of those versions.
43.
by phicoh 8mo ago
This is what makes Rust Rust and I'd say what makes Rust popular. The way safe Rust is safe. Of course this comes at the expense of making writing unsafe a lot harder. Though I can imagine that unsafe Rust still has to many of the safe
44.
by phicoh 8mo ago
The goal of Rust is not so much to avoid unsafe, the goal is to maximize safe code. The reason is that you don't have to check safe code for all the guarantees to get from the Rust language. This has a big effect on unsafe code. When u
45.
by phicoh 8mo ago
In practice, with Rust the problem is somewhere else. There is a libc crate that wraps the Unix system calls, so no need to worry about that. What is a lot harder is that Unix filenames are not guaranteed to be UTF-8. So you can't conv
46.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Typically, MUST means that if you don't do that then something will break at the protocol level. SHOULD means that if you don't that, bad things are likely to happen, but it will not immediately break at the protocol level and dur
47.
by phicoh 8mo ago
Maybe because the performance gain is just not there. Adding support for string with explicit length everywhere is a huge amount of work. And then the question is whether such a string is like a Rust slice or something else. And then the ga
48.
by phicoh 8mo ago
C uses pointer casts all over the place to fake generics. If you don't have that (in Pascal or MODULA-2) then life becomes very unpleasant. There is a quite a bit of C code that makes creative use of the size of allocations. For exampl
49.
by phicoh 8mo ago
The thing for me at least is that when I looked at Pascal, MODULA-2, Ada, if you had complex data structures which had to allocate and deallocate memory, then those language would not help at all. They would allow you to make pointer mistak
50.
by phicoh 8mo ago
I wonder if a few people going beyond what is reasonable, is representative of open source projects. For a lot of open source projects, if you have a normal day job and spend a few hours per week on a project, then the project just never ge
51.
by phicoh 8mo ago
There have always been young people who can quickly hack something together with whatever new tools are available. That way of working never lasts, but the tools do last. When tools prove their worth, they get taken into to normal way softw
52.
by phicoh 9mo ago
I'm curious about the economic aspects of this. If only experts can use such tools effectively, how big will the total market be and does that warrant the investments? For companies, if these tools make experts even more special, then
53.
by phicoh 9mo ago
We recently got a PR from somebody adding a new feature and the person said he doesn't know $LANG but used AI. The problem is, that code would require a massive amount of cleanup. I took a brief look and some code was in the wrong plac
54.
by phicoh 9mo ago
The problem I see is not so much in how you generate the code. It is about how to maintain the code. If you check in the AI generated code unchanged then do you start changing that code by hand later? Do you trust that in the future AI can
55.
by phicoh 10mo ago
I'm not sure what you are talking about. Our software has a stub resolver that is not the one in glibc. It directly issues DNS requests without going through /etc/nsswitch.conf. It would have been fine if it was getaddrinfo (
56.
by phicoh 10mo ago
It's not a trade-off. Use of /etc/resolv.conf and port 53 is defined by historical use and by a large number of IETF RFC. When you violate those, it is broken. That's why systemd has such a bad reputation. Systemd almost
57.
by phicoh 10mo ago
If you don't like that systemd is broken, then you can turn it off. Yes, that's why people are avoiding systemd. Not so much that the software has bugs, but the attitude of the community.
58.
by phicoh 10mo ago
It is a bit of a bummer if you spend quite a bit of time tracking down a very weird DNS bug and it turns out to be systemd-resolved. And I don't want to go into all of the time spend getting systemd unit files correct. There is very ac
59.
by phicoh 11mo ago
systemd-resolved responds on port 53. It inserts itself in /etc/resolv.conf as the DNS resolver that is to be used by DNS stub resolvers. It can do whatever it likes as longs as it follows DNS RFCs when replying to DNS requests. R
60.
by phicoh 11mo ago
Systemd-resolved invents DNS records (not really something you would like to see, makes debugging DNS issues a nightmare). But worse, it populates those DNS records with IPv6 link local addresses, which really have no place in DNS. Then, wh

More ›