And he wrote a proprietary ASN.1 compiler and stack.

▲ rvnx 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s far from being impossible, the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw).

C or asm are not obscure languages or anything, they are brutal languages where you have to trace runtime from A to Z, and manage the memory.

In 1990, it was absolutely normal to code in C. Yes you had to decode images yourself, yes you had to decode audio, yes you had to raytrace, etc.

“Wait, you had to calculate all of these by hand ?

Yes my friend everybody had to do that in my time, what else could we do ?

So we took books, and did one by one.

This was the norm, just that it became some sort of archeology.”

Every year, thousands of 19-year-olds complete these tasks in low-level schools like Epita/Epita/42 or in demoscene contests. They aren't geniuses; they are just students who were forced to read the manual and understand how the computer actually works.

Free time won’t guarantee you success, but free time + obsession will (like Terry Davis).

Really, this is not alien tech.

Before FFmpeg, people had to encode the videos. Before emulators someone had to create the state machine, etc. All these people it would be insane to ignore them.

Most of the difficult problems have shifted somewhere else from low-level.

How to simulate millions of pharmaceutical molecules in short amount of time ?

How to simulate the world in GTA VI ?

Saving 2 bytes of memory by writing asm (that… won’t be portable) is not the thing going to save you. The problems are now elsewhere.

The problem now is not about “wow you read ancient manuals and mixed sand with water and got a solid foundational brick” but it is about “ok, using these bricks, how to build a skyscraper that is 1km tall”.

No doubt that these modern programmers are as good as the archeologists who like to explore handcrafted code.

▲ attractivechaos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This doesn't explain why so few people of Fabrice's generation have reached his level. Think about violin playing. Many players can become professionals if they have the obsession, but 99% of them won't reach the Heifetz/Hadelich/Ehnes level no matter how hard they try. Talent matters. Programming is not much different from performing art.

	▲	yallpendantools 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I think this is well covered by his first line: > the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw). Free time (and money for your free time) is a privilege not everyone may have had. Also, access to computers which, don't forget, has only become ubiquitous this century, and sadly not always in the form that might encourage experimentation. Without getting too much into the Nature-Nurture debate, talent and obsession sadly won't go anywhere without the proper environment to cultivate it. You don't become Bellard/Knuth/Dijkstra with just a bunch of rocks[1] and a whole host of other concerns on top. [1] https://xkcd.com/505/

▲ __patchbit__ 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Victor Taelin posts an intuition `HVM is missing a fundamental building block' having done 10 years thinking

   https://x.com/VictorTaelin/status/2003839852006232478?s=20

▲ cryptonector 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> It’s far from being impossible, the main thing you need is free time and obsession (and money for your free time btw).

I'm aware :(

(I maintain one, one written by my Swedish friends, whom too were obsessed.)