asciilifeform: verisimilitude: field is not at the 'let's discover immortality' stage; but at the 'start fucking washing hands and not drilling well right next to latrine' stage.
asciilifeform: otherwise you , yes, 'quit drinking' but started instead heroin.
asciilifeform: typical 'type 1' fail is the various 'safety' bolt-ons to c/cpp, where yes you can use 'smart pointer' kludge but old barbaric 'dumb' is still permitted (and if you want nontrivial proggy, ~mandatory)
asciilifeform: typical 'type 2' failure is, e.g., 'wayland'
asciilifeform: outside of unix planet, typical example of type 3 failure is r5rs scheme (which is ~impossible to write nontrivial program in without reintroducing good % of what makes it seem 'light' vs commonlisp )
asciilifeform: and 3) not create a vacuum that gets immediately filled by similar or even dumber
asciilifeform: 'stop using' is generally the correct solution to all sortsa problem. trick is that you gotta 1) ~actually stop~ 2) not immediately replace the excised idjicy with a new one
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: there are other 'old unix' cargo cults in the historic record, also; all are quite similar to cat-v , near as i can tell.
asciilifeform: ( at one time, they had a fella with a working brain involved, then he vanished, and what remained grew over with fungus. )
asciilifeform: fact is, even long before lispm, on the old cdc mainframes, buffer overflow was impossible.
asciilifeform: and naturally the idiot camp splits into the 'useful idiots', who are physiologically incapable of having a clue, and the purposefully-mendacious charlatans, who know exactly where 'exploitable' comes from and ~like~.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: the zero-terminated string more or less single-handedly created the 'comp security' pseudo-industry
asciilifeform: ( and with no sign of the inteltards 'waking up' to abandon it )
asciilifeform: or, say , the spectacular idiocy of 'branch prediction', currently racking up cost comparable to chernobyl
asciilifeform: 'devout' c programmer is moar or less synonymous with 'brain damage'. these are the people who think 'typed words are expensive' but think nothing of billion+ transistor in current pentium for tlb cache (so winblows can run 5% faster) .
asciilifeform: (in particular , the cost of storage)
asciilifeform: much of the complexity in the bolix system is, in light of modern tech, unnecessary, it was muchly constrained by the limitations of the period tech
asciilifeform: entirely extinct, casualty of politics and jawdroppingly-inept management; but item to some extent is still available as a fossilized specimen for archaeology.
asciilifeform: 1980s usa; they built machine (and using vertical integration of own tooling, for not only os dev but pcb & ic cad etc) precisely for this.
asciilifeform described, in the past, the general shape of the recipe for this -- you write e.g. small lisp in coupla kb of asm, and large 1 on that, and an adatron on the latter... etc☟︎
asciilifeform: i'd still like to ~categorically~ abolish thompsonism at some pt tho.
asciilifeform: ( if yer using a heathen gnat, and a gcc5+istic one, it will output the familiar gcc5isms; but we aint using one )
asciilifeform: trinque: fwiw i routinely disasm what my gnat shits forth, and haven't yet found any 'surprises', so if ye olde gnat is indeed thompsonistic, it is quite subtle , rather than hammer-in-yer-face 'here's a MB of ??? that phones home to mars'
asciilifeform: ( it does in fact build own self , once built, so can relight the fire indefinitely )
asciilifeform: trinque: seems to me that for nao, a working binary build of ave1-gnat gotta be included in standard cuntoo, same as working kernel etc
asciilifeform: ( whether this wins over starting from empty, remains to be seen )
asciilifeform: trinque: possibly at some pt i'ma start to pillage the bolix adatron, for this .
asciilifeform: ( as it is, we have an active unresolved 'thompsonism' in the mix )
asciilifeform: the ultimate win would be to get something other than gnat ( say, an adatron implemented in cl... ) that can build something resembling a working gnat. but sadly i suspect this is yrs away.☟︎
asciilifeform: trinque: iirc finding & killing whatever piece in gcc outputs variant turd and makes bins unreproducible is on ave1's conveyor
asciilifeform: and therefore the only one we presently use.
asciilifeform: theoretically it may be possible to build it with a diff adatron, but gnat is the only openly published one
asciilifeform: this is consequence of the fact that gnat is written in ada.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: sadly ~all~ gnats require a working , existing gnat, to build
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: tell us a bit re what you're building ?
asciilifeform: so in principle it doesn't particularly matter what flavour of linux you're on (unless want to ~rebuild~ it, then will take a bit of sweat)
asciilifeform: incidentally if you're on a x86/x64 box, ave1's gnat will run right as-is, it is built statically and outputs strictly static bins.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: try building ave1's , unless your iron is quite exotic you will probably find that you can build a cross-gnat that outputs bins for it.
asciilifeform: i intend to port ffa to msdos, for instance, and don't expect that gnat will be building it ~on~ dos box.
asciilifeform: this is not in general a problem, e.g. ave1's gnat works just fine as cross-compiler.
asciilifeform: most folx find that it takes them a coupla days to even get 'hello world' to ~compile~.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: imho it is a quite fine lang for building systems where 'surprises' are utterly impermissible. but it does take work.
asciilifeform: ( and already produced a self-contained, glibc-free retargetable gnat, works a++ for e.g. arm64 )
asciilifeform: ave1 is baking a gnat that can build for 'bare irons'.
asciilifeform: plenty of ongoing work, too. diana_coman for instance is determining a safely usable subset of ada tasking system.
asciilifeform: there is plenty of other material in the log, to study from.
asciilifeform: there is not presently a paper book that will teach you ~this~ lang, if you're ready to learn it you can do so from asciilifeform , diana_coman , et al. published works.
asciilifeform: and no 'access variable', except when required to bake os glue
asciilifeform: this means no array concatenation, for instance; or any string ops that do not sit down in apriori known space.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: for instance, i do not use the secondary stack, or any mechanisms which demand it; or any form of heaps ; or classes; etc
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: you will find that the ada used by asciilifeform , diana_coman , et al, is quite distinct flavour from what you see in barnes & in various corners of the net where published ada proggies (not so many) are found
asciilifeform: eventually cracked open some bookz and determined, over course of a year+, a subset of ada which roughly corresponds to 'c without the pointeristic retardation', and used this.
asciilifeform: i explored various alts (e.g. standard-ml sans gc) but found that if the lang produces a binary that cannot be cleanly disasmed and shown to functionally correspond with the source , also cannot in good conscience use such a thing.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: in particular , any system with gc is ruled out right off the bat, as you cannot plug timing sidechannel leak if you got gc in the mix.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: in 2016 i found that i gotta write a safety-critical arithmetic system (nao known as ffa) and found that i cannot in good conscience do it in anyffin but ada.
asciilifeform: see Mocky's review in particular, he actually summarized the whole path that led to the thing
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: there are other langs with strong typing, but afaik ada is the only 1 where a) with actual standard b) doesn't drag along a gargantuan runtime that won't sit down in small single-chip boxes etc
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: you will find that most of the win from adaism is in the approach of thought that it encourages, rather than any mechanical aspect of the lang per se.
asciilifeform: verisimilitude: incidentally diana_coman ( http://ossasepia.com/ ) has quite large set of published ada ( & articles re same ), i highly recommend to read.
