Hacker News: mimd

New comment by mimd in "I quit. The clankers won"

mimd — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 16:35:56 +0000

Considering that the rant is using photos from Star Trek and Oliver Twist to make their points, copyrighted material with no indication of permission, they're less "creative" than a stochastic parrot.

New comment by mimd in "We tasked Opus 4.6 using agent teams to build a C Compiler"

mimd — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 16:53:59 +0000

I'm annoyed at the cost statement, as that's the sleight of hand. "$20000" at current pricing. Add some orders of magnitude to the costs and you'll get your true price you'll have to pay when the VC money starts to wear off. 2nd, this is ignoring the dev time that he/others put in over multiple iterations of this project (opus 4, opus 4.5) and all the other work to create the scaffolding for it, and all the millions/tens of millions of dollars of hand written test suits (linux kernel, gcc, doom, sqlite, etc) he got to use to guide the process. So add some more cost on top of that orders of magnitude increase and the dev time is probably a couple months/years more than "2 weeks".

And this is just working off the puff pieces statements, and not even diving into the code to see it's limits/origins, etc. I also don't see the scaffold in the repo, as that's where the effort is.

But still it's not surprising, from my own experience, given a rigorously definable problem, enough effort, grunt work, and massaging, you can get stuff out of the current models.

New comment by mimd in "European Commission issues call for evidence on open source"

mimd — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 14:27:11 +0000

Opensource is a bit more complex than being a "public good". They're focusing on the low cost as a jump starting point, which make me doubt their sincerity/understanding about managing that relationship healthily.

New comment by mimd in "US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes"

mimd — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 16:23:03 +0000

It's not going to solve the housing issue and is mostly for press (and it's not even getting into ulterior motives), but it might help with preventing a longer term issue of large investors becoming a major issue. Additionally, I wonder about the choice in properties as properties aren't fungible.

New comment by mimd in "Linux Kernel Rust Code Sees Its First CVE Vulnerability"

mimd — Wed, 17 Dec 2025 21:49:02 +0000

Huzzah! You made it to the big leagues Rust! Come join C over here with the "CookiesVE".

New comment by mimd in "Git: Introduce Rust and announce it will become mandatory in the build system"

mimd — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 20:19:04 +0000

I suggest waiting till the gcc side matures, with the minimum of a working gcc frontend for a non optional dependency. Optional dependencies with gcc_codegen might be okay. Git is pretty core to a lot of projects, and this change is risky, it's on a fairly short time frame to make it a core dep (6 months?).

New comment by mimd in "Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire"

mimd — Mon, 05 May 2025 16:56:30 +0000

Rudimentary analysis of five battles spread out over a 1500 year period; supposedly supporting sources that upon examination state their unsureness; stating propaganda casualty numbers without a hint of irony to justify; allows you to unequivocally state that no one did volly fire? Ugh.

New comment by mimd in "Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us""

mimd — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:29:17 +0000

No, it can track pointer bounds and validity across functions. It also targets identifying cases of UB via eva. Both rust and frama-C rely on assertions to low level memory functions. Rust has the same gaping UB hole in unsafe that can cross into safe.

If we are talking about more than memory, such as what greg is talking about in encoding operational properties then no, rust is far behind both frama-C, Spark, and tons of others. They can prove functional correctness. Or do you think miri, kani, cruesot, and the rest of the FM tools for Rust are superfluous?

My mocking was that that the kernel devs have had options for years and have ignored them out of dislike (ada and spark) or lack of effort (frama-C). That other options provide better solutions to some of their intrests. And that this is more a project exercise in getting new kernel blood than technical merits.

New comment by mimd in "Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us""

mimd — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 02:19:14 +0000

Yes, I know the policy that has been stated and the recent docs on it (https://rust-for-linux.com/rust-kernel-policy). A good portion of the R4L group were trying to avoid this scenario due the toxicity of such a change (especially at this early contentious point, and despite what their online advocates want). I don't think the policy will immediatly change because of his statements, but I find it pretty clear that this is where he wants the project to go.

New comment by mimd in "Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us""

mimd — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 14:59:00 +0000

"But for new code / drivers..." encompasses more than just "drivers" and refers to all new code. I doubt it's a mistake either due to the way the rest of the email is written. And Greg said "no one sane ever thought that (force anyone to learn rust)" just 5 months ago (https://lkml.org/lkml/2024/8/29/312). But he is now telling his C devs they will need to learn and code rust to make new code in the kernel.

New comment by mimd in "Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us""

mimd — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 23:45:16 +0000

https://llvm.org/devmtg/2023-05/slides/TechnicalTalks-May11/...

Supposedly ~5% (1-29%), but I'm testing my own projects to verify (my guess is higher at 10-20%, but will depend on the code). Supposedly it's to land in gcc at some point but I dunno the time table.

New comment by mimd in "Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us""

mimd — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 22:30:37 +0000

Yes, panicking in kernels is bad. I've followed the whole R4L fight about working around it.

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/main/doc...

Upstream fbounds in xnu has options for controlling if it panics or is just a telemetry event. They are in a kernel situation and have the exact same considerations on trying to keep the kernel alive.

New comment by mimd in "Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us""

mimd — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 22:15:21 +0000

Isn't this a bait and switch, that all the c kernel devs were complaining about? That it wouldn't be just drivers but also all new kernel code? The lack of candor over the goal of R4L and downplaying of other potential solutions should give any maintainer (including potential rust ones) pause.

Anyway, why just stop at rust? If we really care about safety, lets drop the act and go make everyone do formal methods. Frama-C is at least C, has a richer contract language, has heavy static analysis tools before having to go to proofs, is much more proven, and the list goes on. Or, why not add Spark to the codebase if we are okay with mixing langs in the codebase? Its very safe.

New comment by mimd in "Greg K-H: "Writing new code in Rust is a win for all of us""

mimd — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 21:29:56 +0000

If you look at the CVE lists, about 70-80% of all c memory bugs are related to OOB Read and Write. Additionally, like rust, fbounds-safety can remove redundant checks if it can determine the bounds. My question is how likely can it be adopted in the kernel (likely high).

I will need to read their conversations more to see if it's the underlying fear, but formalization makes refactoring hard and code brittle (ie. having to start from scratch on a formal proof after substantially changing a subsystem). One of the key benefits of C/Kernel have been their malleability to new hardware and requirements.

New comment by mimd in "USDA fired officials working on bird flu, now trying to rehire them"

mimd — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 07:08:19 +0000

Well, it will be really funny when the executive branch starts firing all the judiciaries security (USMS JSD, under DoJ) to save costs. But secondary outcomes have either not dawned or dissuaded the recent courts on their path to increasing executive power.

New comment by mimd in "US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago"

mimd — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:22:57 +0000

Of course they are. Any rational person not blinded by partisanship would be infuriated by this development and immediately demand that DOGE be restrained. Even most partisans would blanch and demand accountability. DOGE advocates know this. Their only recourse is to try to hide it or distract everyone with tangential arguments like they are doing in this thread.

New comment by mimd in "US government struggles to rehire nuclear safety staff it laid off days ago"

mimd — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 16:14:24 +0000

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-...

If even half of NPR's report is true, the way in which it was conducted was grossly cruel and with complete ignorance.

DOGE and it's supporters are quiet literally playing like a child with the levers that decide if you wake up tomorrow.

New comment by mimd in "Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities"

mimd — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:19:40 +0000

Since the rest of the advisory is demanding full scale rewrites into a new language based on llvm that has officially nuetered it's gcc port, I don't think they really care about those sorts of concerns. Hence my annoyance at their proposal. The fbounds devs do, as the design allows for modified source to be still compilable in alternative toolchains that do not support fbounds (you can remove them via macros) and they are working to add it to gcc. And I don't think its going to matter much soon if it's limited to gcc/llvm, as all the proprietary vendors left and right are dropping their 30+ year compilers to piggyback off llvm (I don't exactly agree with this btw, but it is what it is).

New comment by mimd in "Type safe variadic printf"

mimd — Sat, 15 Feb 2025 00:16:35 +0000

Not to fully encapture C's variadic printf, but on the macro front, I've been having fun creating type checking for macros by a constexpr allocation from a _generic switch type check of the args and then checking the result with static_asserts. I think there was a hack before as you mentioned but would have to dig through my tests to find it, but the C23 version is quite clean. Might want see if I can get it to be clean for a variadic printf version.

New comment by mimd in "Feds want devs to stop coding 'unforgivable' buffer overflow vulnerabilities"

mimd — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 18:25:12 +0000

I wish they would have gone more indepth about the current compiler work, such as stack defenses or fbounds-safety. It should cover OOB read and write safety, which is 70-80% of C's memory vulnerabilities, for a marginal performance overhead and with abi compatibility.

https://clang.llvm.org/docs/BoundsSafety.html