With prefabs you first dig up both road and sidewalk, set up pre-cut granite curbs (kerbs?) on a mild concrete foundation (negates sinking completely), then repour and repave sidewalk and road. Lasts many years in -20C winters +35C summers climate.
I estimate two weeks from having never seen kernel source to something reasonably stable based on experience with block devices/raid controllers. But I knew a bit of C (had patches merged into SVN, Exim4, etc).
And the BSDs code are fairly simple as things go. Lots of specific domain knowledge sure, but you can find books and article fairly easily. The code itself is straightforward.
This is all well and good, but the problem is that those systems leak left and right. No amount of politics can stop that.
Back in the day when first ALPRs went into operation (I don't remember, was it 10 or 15 years ago) it took about two weeks for the data to appear on darkweb.
Then the same happened to citywide face recognition.
The only way to stop abuse is to not collect the data : ban the systems entirely.
LNG aviation does not make any more sense than H2 aviation. Even LPG does not make any sense since you neither can haul 16 bar fuel tanks, nor can you realistically maintain temperature for 1-2atm pressure. And any leak is not 'oh. look, a kerosene stain on tarmac', it's ready-made fuel-air explosion.
On the plus side we would be able to retire airport fire engines because they would never be able to get to a crash before it completely burns out.
You mean 1991 Elite Plus? The whole series has been reverse-engineered to death and back. Maybe you mean some other game?
Anyway, for those old titles I don't think not having source is that much of a problem. I participated in two reimplementations of 1994 XCOM : UFO2000 and OpenXcom, helped the 1oom project (first Master of Orion) and I don't think having original source would have helped much.
No, I'm doing the original 1987 PC Elite. The later one was written by Chris Sawyer. I asked him recently and he also has no idea about Andy who wrote the prior version (both for Realtime). [both versions I assume were written in 100% ASM] Surprisingly Gemini seems to be pretty good at writing 8088 CGA assembler, especially in Deep Think mode. It one-shot an entire filled poly renderer and 3D engine.
I worked with some of the original XCOM guys after a bunch of them left Microprose to set up on their own. I wrote a lot of the graphics engine for this, which was really a direct descendent of XCOM:
It's.. not a compiler (besides I had Forth on my C64). Maybe one can call it a translator to ad-hoc bytecode. I also had USCD Pascal on that C64 which translated to bytecode. This was more JVM-like. So nothing hard about it.
Forth is a compiler but what it "compiles" is not standard. The implementor decides what they need.
Forth can compile pointers to native code that are the VM's instructions, called direct threading.
Forth can compile pointers to pointers to native code VM instructions, called indirect threading.
Forth can compile byte code like OpenFirmware/OpenBoot.
And modern systems compile optimized native code (VFX Forth, SwiftForth) but still remain fully interactive at the console.
Point of information: By and large FORTHs did not use bytecode. Execution tokens (XTs) were usually stored as a function of the default word size, which typically was 16 bits. There were some FORTHs that went out of their way to use token threading so they could store programs in byte codes, but those were pretty rare. Rarer still were programs that mixed byte code with word-sized code (although one such scheme is described in an issue of Forth Dimensions).
MKAD, the 101km circle road around Moscow had almost exclusively this style of intersections up until 2010s, when congestion got absolutely unbearable. Then all of them got rebuilt, typically adding overhead ramps, tunnels, and crazy-long but separate right lines, and by now it's almost impossible to navigate w/o gps navigator (which gets jammed often). Also forget about easily changing direction.
I was rewriting a mod for Rimworld recently. As Rimworld is built on Unity, it's all some sort of C#. I heard people say it's a wrong kind of C#, but since a) I had no choice and b) I never wrote any C# before I cannot tell.
First, C# proudly declares itself strongly-typed. After writing some code in Zig (a project just before this one, also undertaken as a learning opportunity, and not yet finished), I was confused. This is what is called strong-typed? C# felt more like Python to me after Zig (and Rust). Yes there are types. No, they are not very useful in limiting expression of absurdity or helping expression of intent.
Second, test. How do you write tests for a mod that depends on an undocumented 12 year old codebase plus of half a dozen of other mods? Short answer - it's infeasible. You can maybe extract some kind of core code from your mod and test that, but that doesn't help the glue code which is easily 50-80% in any given mod.
So what's left? I have great temptation to extract that core part and rewrite it in Zig. If Unity's C#-flavor FFI would work between linux and windows, if marshalling data would not kill performance outright, if it won't scare off potential contributors (and it will of course), if, if...
I guess I wanted to say that the tests are frequently overrated and not always possible. If language itself lends a hand, even as small and wimpy as C#'s, don't reject it as some sort of abomination.
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