Hacker News: wucke13

New comment by wucke13 in "Why did containers happen?"

wucke13 — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 23:40:38 +0000

My take: containers forced devepopers to declare various aspects of the application in a standardized, opinioated way:

- Persistant state? Must declare a volume. - IO with external services? Must declare the ports (and maybe addresses). - Configurable parameters? Must declare some env variables. - Trasitive dependecies? Must declare them, but using a mechanism of your choosing (e.g. via the package manager of your base image distro).

Separation of state (as in persistency) and application (as in binaries, assets) makes updates easy. Backups also.

Having most all IO visible and explicit simplifies operation and integration.

And a single, (too?!?) simple config mechanism increases reusability, by enabling e.g. lightweight tailoring of generic application service containers (such as mariadb).

Together this bunch of forced, yet leaky abstractions is just good enough to foster immense reuse & composability on to a plethora of applications, all while allowing to treat them almost entirely like blackboxes. IMHO that is why OCI containers became this big, compared to other virtualization and (application-) cuntainer technologies.

New comment by wucke13 in "A comparison of Ada and Rust, using solutions to the Advent of Code"

wucke13 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:21:22 +0000

For the seL4 proofs a subset of C was formalized, for example.

(Already mentioned) CakeML would be another example, together maybe with its Pancake sibling.

Also: WebAssembly!

New comment by wucke13 in "A comparison of Ada and Rust, using solutions to the Advent of Code"

wucke13 — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:13:33 +0000

That's pohibitively expensive in the general case when external input is used and/or when arithmetic is used on the values (main differerence to sum-types).

New comment by wucke13 in "A comparison of Ada and Rust, using solutions to the Advent of Code"

wucke13 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 19:00:03 +0000

I know quite some people in the safety/aviation domain that kind of dislike the subranges, as it inserts run-time checks that are not easily traceable to source code, thus escaping the trifecta of requirements/tests/source-code (which all must be traceable/covered by each other).

Weirdly, when going through the higher assurance levels in aviation, defensive programming becomes more costly, because it complicates the satisfaction of assurance objectives. SQLite (whiches test suite reaches MC/DC coverage which is the most rigorous coverage criterion asked in aviation) has a nice paragraph on the friction between MC/DC and defensive programming:

https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html#tension_between_fuzz_tes...

New comment by wucke13 in "A comparison of Ada and Rust, using solutions to the Advent of Code"

wucke13 — Sat, 04 Oct 2025 18:56:06 +0000

Neither the Rust nor the Ada spec is formal, in the sense of consumable by a theorem prover. AFAIK for Ada Spark, there is of course assumptions on the language semantics built-in to Spark, but: these are nowhere coherently written down in a truly formal (as in machine-readable) spec.

New comment by wucke13 in "Boeing has started working on a 737 MAX replacement"

wucke13 — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 20:36:24 +0000

I think what parent was about is open vs. closed loop control, not fly-by-wire or not. Both their and your point stand of course.

New comment by wucke13 in "Zero ASIC releases Wildebeest, the highest performance FPGA synthesis tool"

wucke13 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 09:29:25 +0000

I have dedicated a large chunk of my (arguably short) professional career on improving upon this, mostly in the safety critical software domain. What was your experience back then, what made you leave ultimately, and what do you do now?

New comment by wucke13 in "The Weird Concept of Branchless Programming"

wucke13 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 07:31:18 +0000

Rust in particular with miri is quite impressive at catching them. You just run your testcases via

    cargo miri run

And if your code actually touches UB, mirei will most likely point out exactly where and why.

New comment by wucke13 in "RedoxFS is the default filesystem of Redox OS, inspired by ZFS"

wucke13 — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 09:22:49 +0000

It doesn't necessarily, but it can. Genode/SculptOS is kind of a microkernel OS framework, and it can use seL4 as the kernel.

Here is a talk about that porting effort:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=N624i4X1UDw

New comment by wucke13 in "SkiftOS: A hobby OS built from scratch using C/C++ for ARM, x86, and RISC-V"

wucke13 — Sat, 13 Sep 2025 12:31:52 +0000

Gernot Heiser would strongly disagree with you on the last one :D

New comment by wucke13 in "Hyundai wants loniq 5 customers to pay for cybersecurity patch in baffling move"

wucke13 — Sun, 17 Aug 2025 08:36:19 +0000

I'm not so sure, I thought "patch" originated from hole punching cards to program stuff. A software patch was literally a patch of tape that hides an errorneously punched hole in such a card.

The term patch-cable seems to be way younger.

New comment by wucke13 in "Two Birds with One Tone: I/Q Signals and Fourier Transform"

wucke13 — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 06:07:59 +0000

https://www.pe0sat.vgnet.nl/sdr/iq-data-explained/

This is an excellent introduction to the concept and also to the why complex numbers are used to represent signal samples.

New comment by wucke13 in "Zig's New Async I/O"

wucke13 — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 09:05:47 +0000

Is this in effect introducing algebraic effects by concept? E.g. the io passed in is an effect handler, and it is the effect handler's choice whether to perform stack switching (or other means of non-blocking waiting) to enable asynchronicity?

New comment by wucke13 in "EasyTier – P2P mesh VPN written in Rust using Tokio"

wucke13 — Thu, 29 May 2025 12:25:19 +0000

This seems to go into a similar direction like ZeroTier, but actually open source. There is almost no discussion of this in the western hemisphere, but I'd be interested what people think about it.

EasyTier – P2P mesh VPN written in Rust using Tokio

wucke13 — Thu, 29 May 2025 12:25:19 +0000

Article URL: https://easytier.cn/en/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44125334

Points: 158

# Comments: 51

New comment by wucke13 in "Rost – Rust Programming in German"

wucke13 — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 13:16:57 +0000

When I first read the examples, besides my laughter, I felt a similar disconnect im the semantics of the chosen German words. Thank you for you suggestions, I agree with all of them, they are better indeed IMHO.

New comment by wucke13 in "Bayleaf · Building a low-profile wireless split keyboard"

wucke13 — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 17:27:40 +0000

I think ZMK (available on the Nice!Nano) does exactly that already?

New comment by wucke13 in "A CIA informant stopped Taiwan from developing nuclear weapons"

wucke13 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 23:56:27 +0000

Would the Paris Climate Agreement not qualify as a treaty?

New comment by wucke13 in "Please Commit More Blatant Academic Fraud (2021)"

wucke13 — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 08:04:36 +0000

Tangentially relevant: Gernots list of benchmarking crimes.

https://gernot-heiser.org/benchmarking-crimes.html

New comment by wucke13 in "Rust Is Eating JavaScript (2023)"

wucke13 — Sun, 16 Feb 2025 15:47:17 +0000

> you can pass integers and pointers around

No, not even that (the second thing, passing pointers)! WASM has a different address space (starting from 0), effectively indexing into the WASM module's linear memory. A pointer/reference from the outside env can not be dereferenced from within the WASM bytecode.

The multiple linear memory proposal can circumvent this (allowing you to build something somewhat similar to a simple MMU/address translation engine), but language support for that feature is sparse (AFAIK, Rust does not expose any way to access a different than the default linear memory for example).

There is various hacks around it, but sharing memory block-wise between WASM and outside env is involved already.