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by forgotpwd16 989 days ago
>Program like the cowboys of old west

That's a very cool title for an article.

3 comments

“Real gunslingers chase down rouge threads and kill them with their bare hands while the operating system and all its logs crumble around them.”
The Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf

> Even as we speak, systems programmers are doing pointer arithmetic so that children and artists can pretend that their x86 chips do not expose an architecture designed by Sauron.

> You might ask, “Why would someone write code in a grotesque language that exposes raw memory addresses? Why not use a modern language with garbage collection and functional programming and free massages after lunch?” Here’s the answer: Pointers are real. They’re what the hardware understands. Somebody has to deal with them. You can’t just place a LISP book on top of an x86 chip and hope that the hardware learns about lambda calculus by osmosis.

Really, I recommend everything by James Mickens every chance I get: https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/wisdom-james-mickens

> rouge threads

"The red threads are not the issue here, dude! ...Also, dude, that's not the preferred nomenclature. 'Native threads', please."

"Cracking Code on the Frontier: Lessons from the Cowboys of the Old West"

https://pastebin.com/DhdHsR3i

See you cyberspace cowboy...