Re: OT: Linix goes politics

Software is a much larger area than the languages used to write it.

The problem with the Russian contributions to Linux is that there's been a least one back door slipped into Linux by a contributor, and nobody wants any more to get in.

The guy who found that back door did a very neat job - he'd found an odd feature in some performance he'd measured, and tracked down what was causing it.

And to some extend it also protects Russian contributors from being the target of being forced to add "bad things"

There's a web site somewhere that lists the known programming languages and variants. I think there are about 3000.

Here is your weekend assignment:

A Pi Pico has hundreds of times more compute power. Maybe thousands. For $7.50.

It's 9000 languages. This was discussed on SED in February 2023. My posting on the subject is "Re: dead programming languages" posted on

Evolution in motion. All but a few will end up as fossils embedded in sedimentary layers.

This plus immediate availability generally wins the business-case analysis.

Joe Gwinn

Pi Pico is more powerful than the onboard computer. But there were also mainframes in ground support center. Pico can perform more integer instructions per second than those mainframes, but has less memory. And mainframes had fast mass storage (drums and a disk farm). Raspberry PI version 1 has more memory and SD-card has more bandwidth than several mainframe disks. OTOH I would avoid SD-card in mission critical operations, so probably two Raspberries (two for reliablilty, ground support mainframes also run in redundant configuration) with external USB SSD discs...

I do not know. Standard commercial MCU-s are used in many small experimental low-orbit statelites, and seem to work, so they may be enough. Certainly before lanching people into space one needs to spend time to test and select stuff that will work well there.

So it's fair to say you're no technophobe, Jan?

Cubesats only last a few years, so commercial parts are often OK.

I have a friend in the small sat business. I'll ask him.

People last a lot shorter time in orbit than uPs.

In evolution, all's fair, even if it isn't squishy critters that are evolving.

Concurrency is far older than any computer language save assembly.

Hardware did concurrency before that.

In the old days, we did multiprocessing, with multiple processors sharing a backplane with multiple processors.

In advanced cases, there would also be a memory board on one of the backplane slots, where data used by all could be retained - the blackboard model was common.

Later, threads were invented, this being concurrent threads of control within the same process and thus address space. Etc.

And realtime operating systems were basically clouds of independent but interacting finite state machines. As was the hardware being controlled. The mapping between hardware and software FSMs needed to be clean, or things got pretty awkward.

In none of these cases were the computer languages expected to have any critical role in handling and implementing concurrency.

Which is good because they were not very good at concurrency.

To summarize, the software folk had no idea how hardware actually worked, and the hardware folk didn't speak software.

Databases are a swamp of their own, and are far too slow and unreliable for embedded realtime. It's very common to use N-dimensional hash tables for storage and access of random data. Hash table lookup is a O[1] (constant-time ) operation that does not degrade as data accumulates.

Joe Gwinn

Pi5 and attach server grade NVME storage

Sure...until the "spooks" show up at your door and insist that you prove you are not an agent for "the other spooks" :-)

Yes. I have a couple of Pi5s each with a 1Tbyte NVMe card. They are very nice machines. On the other hand, for only a little more there are some cheap N100 machines which also have removable NVMe memory. John

have you seen some of the closed source code that has tried to go open source? it usually fails because no one remembers what code was outright stolen, what was taken from open source and in violation of licenses, and what was bought from 3rd party with no right release, under NDA or violating patents