Bootstrapping

A series of 5 articles · in progress

What if all software suddenly disappeared? What's the minimum you'd need to bootstrap a practical system? I decided to start with a one sector (512-byte) seed and find out how far I can get.

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Terminating the terminal case of Linux

September 25, 2021 · 13 minute read

I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a very calm and pleasant evening, when, all of a sudden, amos the fasterthanlime published an article entitled "A terminal case of Linux". With a title that makes you sigh when you get it, he explains his adventure of capturing colored terminal output of a Linux process.

After a journey through the bowels of libc, the Land of Terrible Truths, and as is in Amos's style, many underlying details of the problem, we arrive at a program that does what we've set out to do. Well, almost. Read more

Compiling Rust is NP-hard

July 7, 2021 · 11 minute read

...though it's not the flagship borrow checking that's at fault. What I noticed, and would like to share with you today, is that the exhaustiveness checking performed by the Rust compiler on match patterns is a superset of the SAT problem. Read more