pinealservo

5 ms·

1.
by pinealservo 9y ago
If you mean wide use on a desktop, sure. QNX is definitely microkernel-based, though, and it's used widely in automotive head units and now Blackberry devices. Way nicer to write device drivers for than Linux!
2.
by pinealservo 9y ago
I think you miss the point of a microkernel! The point is to keep all your "features" outside of it, and to use it only to implement the core set of functionality necessary to have secure shared access to the hardware. The general
3.
by pinealservo 9y ago
Scheme is absolutely a suitable replacement for perl or ruby, but the ease with which you can accomplish things will depend on the set of libraries available, which varies a lot between implementations. Racket is not just Scheme anymore, bu
4.
by pinealservo 11y ago
As a point of possible interest to people who are interested in programming language history, I'm going to elaborate a bit on this topic: The root of this particular family tree is essentially a fusion of the lambda calculus-inspired p
5.
by pinealservo 11y ago
Here are some arguments from the guys who did something like this before for Oberon: ftp://ftp.cis.upenn.edu/pub/cis700/public_html/papers/Franz97b.pdf To summarize: 1. Much smaller representation, which w
6.
by pinealservo 11y ago
There are definitely reasons for manual memory management to still be a thing, but if a GC disposes of memory "too soon", i.e. when there are still live references to the memory, then it is a bug in the GC or in some FFI code that
7.
by pinealservo 11y ago
The Peano Axioms are not about defining what 'addition' and 'multiplication' are; they're about presenting a model of the natural numbers along with the operations of addition and multiplication in first-order lo
8.
by pinealservo 11y ago
That's a little bit ironic, considering the hijinks Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak got up to before they started selling computers: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/the-de...
9.
by pinealservo 11y ago
I used QNX extensively for a few projects at work, as it has historically been used quite a bit in the "automotive infotainment" world. I was really impressed by the overall clean architecture and documentation of the system, and
10.
by pinealservo 12y ago
I have been studying AsciiDoc lately. It turns out to be a really hacked-together macro language for creating "ad-hoc lite markup" to "SGML/XML-based semantic markup" conversions. The core idea and the default ad
11.
by pinealservo 12y ago
It's entirely possible to do so; there are even typed assembly languages and "bitdata" types and typed memory regions. Types in general can be far more expressive than most people know. Very expressive types are not necessari
12.
by pinealservo 12y ago
This is too much machinery to build into a general-purpose compiler today, but there are static analysis tools (see Frama-C and the like) that will analyze your program text (optionally with annotations like you've mentioned) and figur
13.
by pinealservo 12y ago
He seems to be saying "types are just a formal system; they are meaningless until given meaning by an interpretation". Which is, of course, true. But the same can be said of programming languages. They're just meaningless squ
14.
by pinealservo 12y ago
Not being a *nix is actually not a disadvantage at all in this context. You'd be surprised how little of an OS you actually need, and how inapplicable most libraries designed for PCs are. In other words, you're thinking like a hob
15.
by pinealservo 12y ago
> The same sort of thing applies to wealth, for example, but nobody tells the poor to just acquire some will power and start spending less than they earn. Maybe you've been reading particularly good advice about wealth, but I can as
16.
by pinealservo 13y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment expressed by the introduction to this article. We really do seem to have got stuck in a deep rut, where we can make progress laterally but can't seem to come up with anything truly novel to mov
17.
by pinealservo 13y ago
To be really pedantic, "algebraic functions" are functions that can be defined as the roots of polynomial equations, I.e. solutions of equations of the form f(x_1, x_2, ..., x_n) = 0. There are other, more general notions of &quot
18.
by pinealservo 13y ago
The Haskell language is described in The Haskell Report via an informal presentation of its denotational semantics. Its types are all "lifted" from Sets to something like Scott Domains to account for partiality and non-termination
19.
by pinealservo 13y ago
I have a hard time understanding the supposed elegance of C. I know it pretty well and use it all the time, but only because it's what the platform demands. On the one hand, C has a tiny runtime that can be omitted or replaced. On the
20.
by pinealservo 13y ago
The core semantics of the two are kept in close correspondence as new versions of the standards come out. There are a few points where C and C++ disagree on things that they have in common, but C programs will almost always compile as C++.