@jk upon reading this toot Dennis Ritchie's ghost manifested in my room, took the UNIX manual from my shelf and smashed my laptop with it

@grainloom @jk There's a standard library function for this.

http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/aspnes/pinewiki/C(2f)Randomization.html#The_rand_function_from_the_standard_library

@starbreaker @grainloom the implementation isn’t silly enough im afraid

@jk @starbreaker @grainloom go look again, it's randomly silly

@djsundog @jk @starbreaker @grainloom reimplement libc with a focus on maximizing implementation silliness

@djsundog @jk @starbreaker @grainloom oh wait that's just called msvc whooooops

@io @grainloom @starbreaker @jk @djsundog reimplement libc by shelling out to, well, shell utilities.

did I reinvent plan9 yet?

@SoniEx2 @djsundog @jk @starbreaker @io that's almost what @Shamar 's Jehanne OS does/will do, AFAIK.
Eg. he's been throwing around ideas like "allocation should be done by writing to a file" and other stuch stuff.

@grainloom @Shamar @io @starbreaker @jk @djsundog memory should be a file.

the only syscalls should be mmap and system.

@SoniEx2 @djsundog @jk @starbreaker @io @grainloom

I suggest you to try implement an OS with such approach, just for fun.

But that's now how I design syscalls for #Jehanne.

It's core abstraction is the file (for a certain definition of #file).

All services that can be exposed as file operations, are. Process memory allocation, for example, is done with a create() of a file; current time is done with a remove() of another file.

@Shamar @grainloom @io @starbreaker @jk @djsundog strcpy(mmap("/sys/mkfile", ???), "/tmp/memory"); mmap("/tmp/memory", ???); etc

@SoniEx2 @djsundog @jk @starbreaker @io @grainloom

This looks pretty weird to me.

I don't like mmap at all.

BUT, I will not be the guy who tell you to NOT hack something.

I strongly encourage you to try to write such OS. You might fail to create anything usable, but you will learn a lot in the process anyway.

Or you might succeed, showing everyone else that it was a good idea.

And I strongly encourage you to document the whole process, whatever the outcome: it's always worth to #hack.

@Shamar @io @starbreaker @jk @djsundog

Tbh I'd first recommend @SoniEx2 that they look more into Plan 9, before trying to implement something simply for aesthetic purity.

@grainloom @SoniEx2 @djsundog @jk @starbreaker @io

Well, sure.

I'd suggest to look more into Plan 9 to anyone. 😉

But if someone propose an hack I find particularly weird (but not dangerous for anyone), my first reaction is: you should really try this! 👍

Any other reaction might discourage the hacker.

@Shamar @io @starbreaker @jk @djsundog @SoniEx2

But Jehanne is only based on #Plan9 , it's not Plan 9, so... you probably only reinvented Jehanne?

@jk @grainloom what is worrying is its probably feasible. one Asterisk telephone exchange at work (soon going to be replaced) has version of Asterisk/Zaptel that segfaults on British Telecom line test signals, that are sent late every evening, then restarts as if nothing has happened (other than console warning and the core dump in /tmp).

So it must be possible to use a script to keep running the cursed code and eventually return the "good" values 😉

@mikeburns I did write "arbitrary" at first but she specifically said "random" and I wanted the quote to stay true to life 😛

@mikeburns but yes, good point!