Hacker News: ssrc

New comment by ssrc in "Everyone says assembly is untyped—everyone is wrong"

ssrc — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 10:10:56 +0000

Lisp machines come to mind, like the Symbolics 3600.

New comment by ssrc in "In the Beginning was the Command Line (1999)"

ssrc — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 22:19:30 +0000

Arguably this started in the mainframe world in 1969, with IBM "unbundling" software and services from hardware sales, after the US government launched an antitrust suit against them.

New comment by ssrc in "Patterns.dev"

ssrc — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:36:07 +0000

Some patterns in the GoF book only apply to C++/Java as they were in 1994, but I don't see any reason why other languages would have no useful patterns. The Linux kernel (C) is full of patterns for example.

Funny thing, Peter Norvig also has this position, that patterns only apply to languages like Java, but his book on Lisp and the Python course he had on Udemy (?) are super-pattern-y.

New comment by ssrc in "The Future of Programming (2013) [video]"

ssrc — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 15:29:46 +0000

If you are ok with the performance you can obtain from an FPGA, you could do it now. Look at FPGA hardware-software co-design and related stuff.

If you mean, in general, for the hardware that already exists, that's what the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) of the operating system tries to do.

New comment by ssrc in "FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT"

ssrc — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 18:03:55 +0000

And the FPGA is a modern day equivalent to an ULA. If they could have put all of the chips in a single programmable one, they would.

New comment by ssrc in "Brimstone: ES2025 JavaScript engine written in Rust"

ssrc — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 17:50:52 +0000

I'm old enough to have seen the "written in lisp", "written in ruby", "written in javascript" eras, among others. It's natural.

New comment by ssrc in "Writing a DOS Clone in 2019"

ssrc — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 13:35:38 +0000

I remember the books on undocumented functionality like

https://archive.org/details/Undocumented_DOS

New comment by ssrc in "Transpiler, a Meaningless Word (2023)"

ssrc — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 09:58:20 +0000

For me, the "human-readable" part is key. It's not just that the output is e.g. javascript, but that it is more or less human-readable with about the same organization as the original code.

If you implement SKI combinators, or three-address instructions, as functions in javascript, and that's the output of your compiler, I would not call that a transpiler.

New comment by ssrc in "Lisping at JPL (2002)"

ssrc — Sun, 25 May 2025 20:52:21 +0000

'Was' is more likely. The list is from 2003, and if FORTH Inc, the (only? biggest?) remaining forth company hasn't updated it...

New comment by ssrc in "Show HN: Resurrecting Infocom's Unix Z-Machine with Cosmopolitan"

ssrc — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 10:11:35 +0000

What's remarkable about Infocom's z-machine is the level of sophistication and polish vs the intended application, maybe unsurprising coming from MIT graduates with access to a PDP-10 as a development platform. Otherwise the use of virtual machines was, maybe not common, but not unusual.

* TinyBasic (1975) was specified (and sometimes implemented) as a VM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiny_BASIC

* Apple Pascal (1979) was a UCSD Pascal system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal

* The COSMAC VIP computer/console's (1977) games were programmed in CHIP-8, a VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8

* Scott Adams' text adventures (1978+) used an application-specific VM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_International

* Wozniak's SWEET16 contained in Apple II Integer Basic (1977) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SWEET16

* If you count Forth as a VM, it was pretty common. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_(programming_language)

New comment by ssrc in "Xerox Alto Source Code (2014)"

ssrc — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 14:45:08 +0000

"Well, Steve [Jobs], I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it." - Bill Gates

https://folklore.org/A_Rich_Neighbor_Named_Xerox.html

New comment by ssrc in "Gordon Letwin OS/2 Usenet post (1995)"

ssrc — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 16:20:08 +0000

Yep, if you have in one hand "Inside Windows NT" by Helen Custer (or one of its successors, "Windows Internals"[0]) and on the other "VMS Internals and Data Structures"[1]...

[0]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/resources/win...

[1]: https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/vax/vms/training/

New comment by ssrc in "Against Best Practices"

ssrc — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 18:44:33 +0000

Like any other discussion of this kind[1] I think this one will go nowhere because 1) the question doesn't have a black and white answer, it's a sliding scale. 2) almost no one is giving examples of what they mean; if they were, they could find that they agree with the person they are replying to. And 3) most people will discard the experiences of people they disagree with "you didn't even try! maybe the problem is you!", and this is easy because this is the internet and the other person can be (is probably?) making it up.

[1]https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2009/09/23/the-duct-tape-prog...

New comment by ssrc in "Game Programming in Prolog"

ssrc — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 11:22:46 +0000

The most similar thing to a "static" Prolog would be Mercury[0] or Turbo Prolog[1]. OTOH, if you want an embed-able logic programming library there is the mini/microKanren family[2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(programming_language)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Prolog

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniKanren

New comment by ssrc in "How to avoid a BSOD on your 2B dollar spacecraft"

ssrc — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 20:16:28 +0000

VxWorks, LynxOS or RTEMS. RTEMS is open source.

New comment by ssrc in "Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit"

ssrc — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 12:07:39 +0000

I mean, it's fun and interesting bullshit that cheats a lot. I'm sure that you could emulate a MIPS using a one-bit processor like the MC14500[0] with enough supporting hardware, real or virtual. Looking forward to it, Dimitry.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MC14500B

New comment by ssrc in "Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison"

ssrc — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 18:25:32 +0000

Months ago I found this presentation on youtube, "Re-architecting SWIS for X86-64"[0], about how VMS was ported from VAX to Alpha to Itanium to x86 that did not have the same AST behaviour.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8kcfvJ1Iec

New comment by ssrc in "Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison"

ssrc — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 12:20:31 +0000

I remember reading those books (ok, it was the 4.3 BSD edition instead of 4.4) alongside Bach's "The Design of the Unix Operating System" and Uresh Vahalia's "UNIX internals: the new frontiers" (1996). I recommend "UNIX internals". It's very good and not as well known as the others.

New comment by ssrc in "The return of pneumatic tubes"

ssrc — Wed, 19 Jun 2024 20:04:49 +0000

And then we send them to Jupiter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Unintentional

New comment by ssrc in "Spur – RISC IV: The Lisp Multiprocessor Workstation"

ssrc — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 18:49:34 +0000

Occam looks like a concurrent Pascal, not like a Forth. The transputer had a 3-element hardware stack but it was used more like a cache for the workspace (kind of the memory stack). You can still find around the manual "Transputer Instruction Set - a compiler writer's guide" that explains how you would do that (section 5.3 Expression Evaluation).

Apart from Occam, there where C, C++ and Fortran compilers. Targeting the transputer is not more difficult than any other stack machine (like the JVM, the .Net CLR, CPython or Pascal p-code).

The weird/interesting thing about the transputer is that it is also an operating system: two task queues (high/low priority), preemptive scheduling and communication through channels (that can be one of the 4 serial ports or memory based).