Nolan Woods 🇨🇦

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦

@thewoods.blog

Bioinformatics, mechatronics, programming, masochism, and the occasional hot take.

38 followers20 following102 posts

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

Sometimes I wish my brain had a factory reset button, and then I remember who the factory was and their parameters are the opposite of what I am aiming for.

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

Would anyone be interested in contributing a new open source Qt based Linux login screen? I need something that is nothing like what is currently available and haven't touched Qt in over a decade. I am open to other frameworks, but they need to support EGL or framebuffer direct rendering.

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

I have been trying to find someone familiar with the internals of the GCC compiler. Is there some structural limitation that would not allow adding operator overriding for built-in types? That seems like the simplest change to solve memory safety for existing code. Maybe @lauriewired.bsky.social? 🧵

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Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

With this, one could extend the operators (particularly pointer operators) to do bounds checks. This would require also overriding the pointer types, increasing their size, appending some extra bytes with bounds info. All of this should be transparent to the compiled code with some exceptions.

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

I don't know enough about the actual silicon to understand the implications of this but I expect that there could be some smart strategy to manage the wider pointer types where needed.

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

I have been trying to find someone familiar with the internals of the GCC compiler. Is there some structural limitation that would not allow adding operator overriding for built-in types? That seems like the simplest change to solve memory safety for existing code. Maybe @lauriewired.bsky.social? 🧵

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

It wouldn't even require extending the language if the operators were broken out into something like crt0.o. The compiler pulls in the implementations allowing the developer to swap out the standard implementation for others.

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

I think the people who are suffering most in software dev are the products of the 2000's "learn to code" and "teach kids to code" campaigns where industry was trying to flood the job market with "just good enough" coders. Computer Science degrees also dont prepare you to be a software engineer and..

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Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

first programming language" and they are almost universally a sign that the person is only interested in getting into the business because they want a large salary or because their family is pushing them for the large salary. Programming is a tool, and you learn to use that tool because you are..

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

trying to solve a problem in your life. That is how you get good, capable programmers. Now we have people who tried to learn to use the tool independent of any meaningful problem and are now stressed that they don't have the abilities needed to actually use the tool effectively.

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

I think the people who are suffering most in software dev are the products of the 2000's "learn to code" and "teach kids to code" campaigns where industry was trying to flood the job market with "just good enough" coders. Computer Science degrees also dont prepare you to be a software engineer and..

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

the software engineering programs I was seeing in the early 2000s from institutions died off likely due to the shift away to private "code camps". We have an army of under skilled, under prepared people who are frantically trying to keep up with the expectations established by the first generation..

Nolan Woods 🇨🇦
@thewoods.blog

of software engineers from the 80s and 90s. Those guys not only got into software engineering because they were particularly interested in the field but also were self taught and literally wrote the books on the subject. I get a lot of people who ask me "how do I learn to code" or "what is a good..

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