oso2k

Here’s the suckless perspective:

https://suckless.org/philosophy/

Also works on DOS w/djgpp.

Does it provide a graphics server in the absence of all the X11 foundation libs? TBH, I've only played with microwindows in DOS, OSX with XQuartz, and Linux with X11.

No.

TinyX is an XServer, it only talks to VESA compatible graphics hardware and provides an X11 interface. It's intended for PCs.

Nano-X is a graphics library that can talk to frame buffers, graphics hardware, or an XServer and can provide some level of X11 interface as well as a Win32 API. It's intended for embedded machines.

Strictly speaking, a monolithic kernel is one which builds in all the code to operate: talk to hardware, load programs, perform its services or even include the ability to load drivers/code to talk to other hardware. All of the key functionality is loaded into the kernel program space but that is usually separate from user space or process space. Dumb programs; smart kernel.

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

A microkernel has a much more limited scope, sometimes just the ability to pass messages or data between processes, and may exclude most of the functionality to talk to hardware. The microkernel program space is separated from user space, process space and driver space. Dumb kernel; smart programs.

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

Maybe with the added feature of screen sharing, file upload/download.

It would be a bad idea today to use RAM as a SATA drive. NVMe is much more performant. SAS is available in 12G and 24G. Better would be to utilize DDR3 or better as an NVMe drive or even birfurcated NVMe device. The RAM drive is a good idea too if you have spare RAM or DIMMs. Compressed ZRAM in Linux makes it even better.

What poor NVMe are you buying that gets 90MB/s? Even the Gen3 Kingston 256MB drive I have does well over 500MB/s in my iozone tests on a Dell Precision 3420. The only time you need mobo support is if you want to boot off NVMe but every PCI-compliant OS should be able to at least see it.

Besides the frameworks TFA lists, you can also build Operators in Ansible or Helm.

https://sdk.operatorframework.io/

Conceptually, an Operator is intended to embody the knowledge and processes of a human operator for a given functionality. Extending the Kubernetes API might be an implementation detail but it’s entirely optional to extend it. Most Operators do extend it in practice, however.

There’s Pi Pico GUS project now

https://github.com/polpo/picogus

Fedora/RHEL have Cockpit, MicroShift, OKD, OpenShift Local, MiniKube, k3s, MicroK8s, TrueNAS SCALE

glibc’s pre-main code is still far larger even with optimized flags. It’s at least a couple KB of disk. You can see the flags I used. I think only ‘-nostdlib’ has to be removed. Some of the code & data glibc adds has purpose (like TLS (thread level storage) bits).

https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0/blob/master/STATS.md

Also worth noting that you should be able get the binary close to 2KB if you pass some other options.

https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0/blob/master/STATS.md

I’d also argue

   > decent amount of stuff that CAN be done in _start before you run main

It’s all optional. Before I found the Linux kernel’s nolibc [0], I wrote a minimal C runtime based on bunch of stuff I read [1]. Only thing you really need to do is align the stack (at least on x86, amd64). You don’t get argc/argv/envp but main will still work.

[0] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/tools/include/...

[1] https://github.com/lpsantil/rt0/blob/master/src/lib/00_start...

   -fomit-frame-pointer is pretty high on the list of most destructive micro-optimizations in the history of open source. When you repurpose the backtrace pointer (RBP) for other things, it totally savages our ability to have native backtraces

Funny. I always learned that the *BP registers stood for Base Pointer and not Backtrace. And then I would use BP to reference function temp variables from that part of the call frame.

The Intel “ASM86 Language Reference Manual” calls it that as well.

https://community.intel.com/cipcp26785/attachments/cipcp2678...

For a non-gaming use, I followed Shelby's/TechTagents' [0] guide for setting up an EEPROM programmer in Fedora 36 with Wine. I've been able to backup and flash several EEPROMs for my EMM8088 [1] XT replica, including BIOS, XT-IDE, VGA, RPL.

In the old days, I used to use Wine for backing up DVDs with DVDShrink, ripping my CD collection to MP3 players, and playing the Windows version of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory before the NVIDIA drivers became viable on Crux Linux.

[0] https://youtu.be/AeZDlz2F8GI

[1] https://www.homebrew8088.com/

I started at JPL in 2002 and worked with dozens of groups. Including many folks who had been at JPL since the 70s. No one ever talked about Lisp. I remember helping a former team member who had transitioned to ground systems port an old Mars Rovers Motif/Xt app to Qt (2 or 3?) on Linux. Blew his mind how much performant Qt was on the same hardware and with simpler code. He only ever mentioned being forced to use Ada for a few years and then being forced to port the code to C/C++ a budget cycle later. Probably around 2006. He had been at the lab since the 80s.

But to be fair to the TFA’s author, prior to about 2007 when we got our first CIO, we could literally use almost any technology as long as it wasn’t illegal and wouldn’t get NASA, JPL, or CalTech in trouble. I ran databases & web sites with public IPs, ran myPHPAdmin, phpNuke, QTSS hosts and bunch of other crazy stuff with public IPs.

Been almost 15 years since I was at the Lab but I don’t recall Lisp being at all popular. And I started there as a Perl & PHP developer before transitioning into Java.

Do you mean cohort or class? MBA programs in the US will use those terms.

  [0] - I can't seem to find the correct word to describe the set of students across the years who pursue a degree in a particular subject (e.g. "Computer Science") on a specific faculty. I.e. the vertical slice.

Many in the US would call it the Department of Computer Science. At my university this was within the College of Engineering, Computer Science & Technology. There was a dozen or so departments in this college, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, etc. There were other colleges like Arts & Letters, Health and Human Services, etc.

I second this comment. I spent the first 8.5 years of my career at JPL as well. My first project out of college was writing testing support tools for the Mars Exploration Rovers (MER) Project. I sat 10 feet from a small window into the Spacecraft Assembly Facility (SAF Building 179). Got to watch the rovers take their first steps. Got to do a ton of interesting things, from Satellite Radio Software Stack Testing (QA), to Project Planning Systems, to first steps into Cloud Computing. Got to fill out forms that placed some of my work into the National Archives.

Also don't forget there's other FFRDCs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federally_funded_research_and_...) in the US.

Also, you can write Win32 apps on Linux with Nano-X/Microwindows.

http://www.microwindows.org/

As matter of practice, I always install git-bash or MinGW or CygWin on my Windows boxes. There's only one instance I've found where these solutions were not sufficient for my uses cases and it was an admittedly horrible corner case where a customer's network forced me to not "do the right thing(tm)".

I like similar tricks. Another trick I like to use is being able to do a `make showconfig` and have it print the list of variables & their values that I care about. You can see that here. You can also see my Make+BASH solution for documenting targets.

https://github.com/lpsantil/oop0/blob/master/Makefile#L87-L1...

That works well if you have targets with simple comments that are directly above the target and don't extend beyond a single line. It may be important to provide several lines of help. This gist has other solutions as well:

https://gist.github.com/prwhite/8168133

There's also a whole GH gist on the topic that a few of us have golf'd on.

https://gist.github.com/prwhite/8168133

The linked blog's solution is also mentioned in the gist comments.

https://gist.github.com/prwhite/8168133?permalink_comment_id...

Yes! You got it.

You can do RAII in C. You still have to define a dtor function.

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

When said company is government subsidized said customer who is also a tax payer, yes. These companies use tax dollars for infrastructure investment and maintenance, at least here in CA.