Posts by fg_swe 1319 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Nov 2021
You did not have valgrind on Apollo and you accidently destroyed your heap structures by means of buffer overflows, use after free etc. Local bugs destroyed the global program integrity. You gave up. I can understand.
C is a language suitable for automatic program generators, not for men.
All of them either successful or at least very influental systems realized in Pascal-like languages.
Hewlett-Packard MPE started out as a mid-level computer, but rose into almost mainframe-class symmetric multiprocessor computing in the 80s and 90s. It was cancelled by HP management despite customers loving it for robustness and security. MPE ran on very powerful PA RISC CPUs in the 90s, which were then faster than Intel products.
Pascal was much more than just an "educational" language. It still has features which are superior to C, like number domains and arithmetic exceptions.
This company and this nation have been so successful because they were allowed to operate inside the NATO+JP+SK+ANZAC domain. Because they adopted business and government methods from this domain. Because major corporations (from Apple to Bosch) from said domain trust them. So NATO was extremely generous to Taiwan and TSMC.
TSMC would be nothing without NATO-sourced machinery, materials, knowledge and high end services. For example, the mirrors from ZEISS build on more than 100 years of German optical engineering and science. It is generous to share this technology and we certainly do not do this with military foes.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Zeiss_(Unternehmen)#Carl_Zeiss_1846%E2%80%931945
It is much more complicated. The Durch are part of NATO and support reasonable defence measures. ASML depends on suppliers from all over NATO(e.g. light sources and mirrors from TRUMPF and ZEISS) and friendly nations. Most importantly, ASML depends on common security, as provided by NATO and friends. Business only works as long as there is a secure environment.
The Chicoms have demonstrated very clearly that they are willing to wage an all-out war against Taiwan. That would cost many lives and disturb business 1000x more than these sanctions.
Doing global business at all cost(such as arming a dangerous tyranny) is a crazy idea which comes from the banker m4fia out of Canary Wharf and Wall Street.
The Dutch live under a common security umbrella and have enjoyed 70 years of peace. They can buy the latest weapons from all over NATO(e.g. F16 fighters or Leopard tanks). That is why they cooperate in defence export measures.
A war in Taiwan would affect them too, much worse than ASML export limits.
A war in Taiwan would affect all of NATO+JP+SK+ANZAC. German Jäger planes have already been deployed to Japan(!) in order to reduce the japanese fear of the coming war. Likewise, German frigates have been sailing to Japan.
https://www.flugrevue.de/militaer/rapid-pacific-flug-aus-singapur-deutsche-eurofighter-erstmals-in-japan/
It is in the best interest of the Netherlands and the rest of said alliance to dial down the flow of technology to China. More technology -> more/better weapons -> more appetite for war.
Free trade has not reduced the likelihood of war, quite the opposite. America is merely coordinating what is in the best interest of the entire alliance and I think also in the best interest of the Chinese, who are led by warmongers at the moment.
Nations who do these things will eventually be wealthy and can be happy(if they do not forget to fear god).
On the other hand, those who fall to the siren songs of collectivism will experience the hard times of starvation and all sorts of unnecessary hardship sooner or later.
That does not mean we should worship the large corporations and the oligarchs who control them. Quite the opposite, oligarchs have proven to effect medical insecurity(to put it mildly).
A strong state will be stronger than the oligarchs, stronger than the Marxists and pursue the interest of his folk.
Price controls and subsidies for software are the wrong approach. Who should decide which developer receives how much money from the central pot ? It would quickly degrade into something like GOSPLAN.
The problem of poor nations is that their elite are rotten people who want to become rich quick, at the cost of their own compatriots. And it does not matter whether they sell out to Geneva, to Moscow or to London. Nations with strong leadership will eventually become wealthy. See South Korea, Singapore, Dubai and many others.
All nations who fell to Marxsim are now either broken or completely broken. Cuba was once a major exporter of coffee, of sugar and other agricultural products. Now Marxism has wrecked them to the point where they must import these products. Their car fleet is the same as the one they inherited from the supposedly evil dictator Somoza.
Same with Venezuela. One of the most oil rich nations, but now starving.
Marxism is a disease and even the mildly intelligent Russkies have found that out by now.
"Global South" is a Moscow term to describe the IQ-limited nations who are on their side, ready to wreck functioning economics. Cuba, Venezuela, Iran, Zimbabwe, ANC-wrecked-Africa and other $hith0les.
SUN started by giving away Java for free, and eventually IBM gave away Eclipse for free, too. IBM has the mainframe business with a very hard to copy dongle(the mainframe itself) and survived, SUN did not. IBM's core business never gave their IP away. As far as I know, you have to pay huge sums for things like MVS/zOS. This business model now works for 60 or more years. SUN worked for about half of that until it was gobbled up by Oracle, who are strongly in favor of tough licensing.
A lot of these idealist/Marxist ideas actually benefit the most wealthy corporations the world has ever seen. Maybe these corporations are the REAL source of the idea of "give away hard software engineering work for free" ? With the C panic we have learned they essentially control the mainstream mass media, so they can certainly pull this off.
A $0 product destroyed the market for a highly useful and highly productive IDE and language. What we got is the Java freetard world of sluggish performance and excessive RAM consumption. Thanks SUN, you dragged down another great company with your freeware suicide.
From my experience in the automotive and some other industries:
1.) Even large companies will steal software then and now. That is why Lauterbach Trace32 or Vector CANoe, CANape are dongled. Why plenty of other tools use the FlexLm Abomination of a license manager.
2.) Large and wealthy corporations happily use free software and only pay if a behemoth like RedHat/IBM or Oracle demands payment under threat of "audit".
3.) It does not matter projects have multi-million dollar of customer-paid revenue. Gratis is king.
4.) Who should set the "proper" price for FOSS projects, if not a RedBlueHat oder an Oracle ? Free enterprise works to a large degree by freedom of pricing decisions.
5.) Most engineers and IT folks are totally clueless when it comes to economics. They will prefer a crap dev-chain for $0 over a $1500 IDE with high productivity in 99 of 100 cases. in 30 of 100 cases, they shell out $500 for an iphone, to impress friends.
6.) Software engineering jobs are only great if there is a way to make revenue with the product of said engineer. In automotive, the car itself is the dongle for car software. The software is heavily dongled to an *individual* car.
7.) If you pay 10 software engineers 1 500 000 Euros per year in total, you better make 3 000 000 in revenue based on their work. If you sell 100 copies per year, that is 30 000 per license.
The system of "free enterprise and strong property protection" is successful, because there are no centrally-controlled price controls. It is successful because one man's nutter is another man's provider of valuable products and services. Rugged individualism is a key source of wealth, not the Marxist idea of "what if we are all equal". Men are neither created equal, nor should they be. They come with highly different skills, education and experience. The key is to enable each one of them to do something useful for the common economy.
Big Companies have already in some ways monopolized Email. They did that by means of complex mechanisms that allegedly defend SMTP from SPAM and other nasty usage. By this, they have made it hard to run your own one-guy SMTP server.
There exist simple protocols to combat this, such as CAPTCHA challenges to new communication partners.
DeltaChat is a open source chat app based on SMTP and GNUpg.
Then there are the XAMPP based chat programs.
But most sheeple will use the mainstream corporate (or worse) controlled apps like WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal. I do so too, because none of my friends was interested in DeltaChat. It looks as if mankind loves to live in gold plated cages, until they scratch off the gold surface and realize the steel bars.
Yes, there are challenges. Pointless egotism, incompetence, childish behaviour.
But that does not mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater and buy American as a "solution", for the reasons pointed out.
The panic German panic acquisition of F35 did a lot of damage while doing nothing to deliver the urgent need for a nuclear capable delivery platform. TORNADO should have been polished(spare parts made available in rich numbers) and upgraded, low level flying should be trained in Germany again. Send a message. The threat will not wait until the F35 arrive, rather the crazies(it is many more than just one guy) of Moscow threaten nuclear war on a weekly basis NOW.
The Ukraine war has created a sense of urgency and I fear there will be much more reason for urgency rather soon. Some people here are either corrupt Moscow assets or they have a calcified brain and cannot adapt to the change of thinking in Moscow and Ankara.
Weakness will make more war, not less. But tell that to the people mentioned. They will do the right thing when their local train station is blown up by an ALCM.
This lack of political will has clogged up the German procurement processes. They have essentially bound their own hands behind their back by means of regulations, processes and other papercr4p.
Leading edge fighter planes are a strategic technology for any nation who can build them. If a nation is dependent on another nation to deliver said aircraft, she will lose a serious amount of sovereignty to the supplier.
Also, leading edge aerospace technologies are critical for the overall technological and scientific development of a nation. Technologies trickle down into other industries such as automotive. For example, ABS brakes and airbags stem from the aerospace sector. AIRBUS is now a highly successful company(50% market share in their sector, worldwide), to a large degree based on technology learned from military jet programs.
If you believe the U.S. defence behemoths, there is a "market for fighter aircraft" and of course they will always win. Little do they say how the Pentagon funded all their R+D plus a fat profit.
From a product point of view, Jäger 90/Typhoon is quite successful. It is one of the leading fighter aircraft as compared to the products of Sukhoi, Chengdu Aircraft, Boeing, D'Assault, Saab and Lockheed.
So if you are not a surrender monkey to the US, you better have your national fighter program. It makes sense to team up with like-minded peer nations to share financing.
Proving a system "safe for life-critical applications" is only to a minor degree dependent on "certified tools".
What you must do is to prove that the system you built with the toolchain is "safe". This is done with processes like V-Model, ASPICE, ISO26262 or DO178. The railway folks have their equivalent standard and the medical folks, too.
Essentially: test the h3ll out of your system. If you have a relevant compiler bug, it will most likely crop up in this process. Of course you will track the issue down to assembly level.
So you can safely use Rust for ABS or flight control, IF your engineering processes are robust and faithfully executed. Today.
...maybe America and friends are currently hit very hard in the crown jewels.
I see reports left and right how foreign actors are hitting NATO government institutions really hard. Some mid-level government entities completely encrypted or their laundry hang out to dry.
Having said that, indeed, one man's security is another man's security risk. That even applies to two men inside NSA.
Some government workers go back to paper for critical stuff(HR security), as far as I can see.
Judicious use of a small number of unsafe code parts is Good Engineering. Ideally, limit the unsafe code to system libraries such as File handling, TCP/IP, GUI and so on.
Much better than 100% unsafe C code. Or "modern" C++ code with some "accidental multithreaded sharing".
Engineering that has "life in hands" is about minimizing risk in an economic fashion. If 99% of your code is memory safe, that is much better than 100% unsafe C or C++.
The compiler of my memory safe language is about 10 000 lines of C++ code and takes about one second to compile 10000 loc on an RPI. Memory Safety is not expensive for the compiler.
Also, in the 70s they already had ALGOL, which was in many ways memory-safe.
C "won", because it was "given away for free".
Turning Turbo Pascal 3 in a single-threaded, memory safe language would be not hard either. It runs on an 80286, 8Mhz like a lightning.
Memory Safety is an important tool in the toolbox, but it does not absolve you from executing a test battery from Unit to HIL Tests. Most importantly, it does not absolve you from cheating on test cases.
But that is true with each and every engineering product. If you test a car by opening and closing doors, you still don't know how it acts in a curve, how it acts over a pothole etc etc.
1.) Ada by itself is not fully memory safe. SPARK Ada could be said to be.
2.) There have been Ada programs which were carefully built, but produced an exception when lots of money was at stake. Ariane V, first flight is premier example.
3.) Exhaustive testing according to the V Model will bring you the confidence that your carefully designed and written system is also doing what it is supposed to do. Unit Testing, Software Testing, System Testing, HIL testing, careful operationalisation, massive datalogging/analysis and a bunch of other validation measures used by premier projects such as Jäger 90.
Of course, if you start cheating on testing, all bets are off. Tests must be first and foremost REALISTIC. And somehow "complete" according to the system use cases.
4.) Memory safe languages can detect quite a few "hidden" bugs during 3. That is exactly when you want to learn about them. Not when an airman's life depends on it.
HP MPE was a successful multi-user, transactional OS written in a Pascal variant. Pascal itself is NOT memory safe, but you can of course limit yourself to not using pointers. Turn on bounds checking. Then you have sort-of-memory-safety. Still no support for multithreading, which is a critical feature these days.
Entire corporations ran their business systems on HP MPE and most of them loved it for reliability and security. It was axed because HP was run by people who preferred to be resellers of other companies such as SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. It would still exist(and make money for HP and customers) if it were not for these surrender monkeys.
MPE ran on powerful PA RISC servers with 16 or more CPUs. Thousands of parallel users. A mainframe OS in all but name.
First, PASCAL is a very good language, especially for students. Strong typing, simplicity, good string facilities. I like it a lot for its spirit.
BUT - it is not memory safe. heap memory is managed essentially the same way as C does, with consequentially the same "bug modes" such as "use after free".
You could create a memory-safe Pascal variant, complete with "smart pointers everywhere" and multithreading-aware type system. But that would no longer be Pascal, but something else.
There have been quite a few successful computers based on Pascal and Algol. Any Turing-complete language can perform self-hosting (compiling itself to binary code). And that is practice, not theory. The Algol mainframes and the C# based OS Singularity were (mostly) memory-safe in the kernel.
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