#if 0

    these_lines_are();
    not_executed();

but most of the cases people just use

/* comments

* these_lines_are();

* not_executed();

*

* end comment */

Then, why?

#if 0

#endif

looks clear and it definitely says how a computer skips many lines.

But we just don't use it because it implies low-level knowledge "that every C developers have"

The idea was to take the concepts of memory reclamation and pointer visibility (stuff you see in EBR or RCU) and map them onto medieval East Asian state-machine logic—specifically the structural and matrix ideas from the Song-Yuan period.

To keep it grounded in actual code, I set up a small concurrent deallocation puzzle using C11 atomics and mapped four classical trigram patterns (乾, 坤, 坎, 離) directly to real-world memory invariants:

* Revoking visibility via CAS before freeing (orthodox safe reclamation)

* Asymmetric pipeline handoffs

* Classic use-after-free bugs from premature freeing

* Race conditions caused by blind `memset` zeroing

It's an attempt to see if ancient structural framing can provide an interesting symbolic vocabulary for modern low-level systems programming, without turning it into philosophical fluff. Thought some folks here might find the crossover interesting.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49653509

Points: 19

# Comments: 7

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49495680

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

:)

I guess my comment is kinda messy, hm..Anyway, thanks for the reminder. Have a good day!

:)

In traditional C, memory safety relies on the programmer correctly ordering `free()` calls. Even in C++ or Rust, while RAII and ownership rules automate this, the logic still lives in the control flow. LibTTAK encodes the lifetime directly into the allocation.

Key features:

Lifetime as data: Every allocation has an explicit expiry.

Access validation: `ttak_mem_access(ptr, tick)` enforces expiry checks at the data level.

Minimalistic cleanup: No GC, but automatically frees memory with an interval, which can be turned off. Also, the user can manually clean up targeted pointers.

Operational coupling: Simplifies staged shutdowns and subsystem boundaries by grouping allocations under a single lifetime.

The goal is to provide the safety of deterministic cleanup without the overhead of a garbage collector or the complexity of complex ownership tracking.

Docs: https://gg582.github.io/libttak

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46910673

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

- Combining open source developers outside the core development regions and major cultural spheres could potentially secure roughly as many contributors as the entire US. - Funding shortages for non-profit foundations are deeply entrenched. Denying or attempting to fix this immediately becomes greed. - It is possible to manage language barriers, cultural barriers, and guidelines for distant countries without becoming a greedy for-profit entity. - This does not mean holding DebConf in every country. However, if the awareness is simply that ‘there used to be no borders, but now it's different from the 90s’ regarding the shortage of personnel, then improvements should be more proactive. - The 2020s are no longer an era of romanticism where one flies from Angola to Germany just for the sake of romance. - Especially as Debian has established itself as an invisible system, becoming the backbone of countless cloud services, there is less room for romanticism to intervene.

I've used Debian since 2015 and have had no complaints during that time. Korea also had ‘administrators’ who spared no expense on plane tickets for GNU since the 90s, but most have now stepped down due to age, or, exhausted from trying to salvage communities torn apart by toxic members, have turned around and declared ‘BSD was right’. However, the project's sustainability deteriorating due to a ‘lack of administrators’ is definitely something that needs to be considered. If sufficient people cannot be recruited, and given that we cannot extend the freeze cycle like Slackware at present, communication between upstream and downstream and the active recruitment of multinational developers are important to resolve the complaints of ‘dependent families’ like Ubuntu.