nicholatian / cosmo-cstar

Welcome to the machine.

This is my GitHub profile. For social media, GitHub is my second-favourite site to use, after X.com.

I am a theoretical informatician and amateur software engineer from the Research Triangle. What code I write is scarce but immaculate, and I have a lot more important contributions to share in architecture instead. I discovered the notion of mechanicalism as an approach to programming, in contrast to functionalism that dominated the world before. I created C* as a variant of ANSI C and the first mechanicalist systems programming language.

For the time being, I need your help in realising this new world of computing. Even the most far-out startups I have managed to get hired at do not grok the implications of this work of mine, but I can tell you some of them right now:

• the end of continuous maintenance of software
• the containment of damage caused by bugs in software
• the death of the rent-seeking financial model that dominates the industry

Furthermore, I can tell you what I am doing now to these ends:

• Creating Sirius DOS, a research platform to bootstrap maintenance-free development. Under the umbrella name of the Byblos SDK, this includes:
  • Oración, an assembler and desymboliser
  • Feeble C compiler, a deliberately non-optimising C compiler
  • Sirius C*, the first C* compiler
  • Hinterlib, a kernel and libc surrogate
  • Quindle, a powerful real mode graphical editor/IDE

Sirius DOS and Byblos will provide a beachhead from which myself and others can begin to develop the first software for Anodyne, the grand personal supercomputer project I began working on in 2022. Anodyne will bring to market several radical things in a fully productised and monetised form, including:

• no conventional “operating system”, instead offering a static “system software”
• the return of cooperative multitasking
• two radical RISC and VLIW instruction set architectures
• a mesh topology bus architecture for peripherals
• an agnostic wire interface for addressing all kinds of memory and storage
• a modular form factor standard that is flexible enough to fit laptops and servers alike
• last-mile wire technology to kill USB

There are many essays I have penned over the years that try to thoroughly explain the informatics concepts at work with this. Some strong ones I can recommend include:

• Functionalism and Mechanicalism
• The forgotten power within the research of John Backus
• The next great leap of computing
• An Ethos for Sustainable Computing
• Our Own Tyrell Corporation
• Memory Safety is a Broken Idea
• Mechanicalism in the real world (RIP Lewis and Unai)
• You are a bad programmer
• You will never make a novel tech product
• Goodbye APIs, hello ABIs
• The von Neumann style and its curse on computer performance
• DevOps is an engineering abomination
• Modular memory
• Schism of function and form (Western, Eastern and Far Eastern Calculi)
• Informational deloading
• Pure data
• Does Rust belong in the Linux kernel?

The first Anodyne machine will be an aluminium tablet measuring 386mm wide, 486mm tall and 32mm thick with a 19” 4:3 multitouch display panel with an active stylus and a tenkeyless mechanical keyboard built-in. Expansion of I/O will be achieved through a slide-in docking mechanism that leaves the display and top row of keys usable.

After the first Anodyne is built and shipped to early adopters and other enthusiasts, the funds will provide for Anodyne II on more competitive processor and display lithographies. At this point the company should be able to stand on its own and carry on with further product ideas I have but cannot share yet.

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If you like what I do, please check out my sponsorship pitch. There are tiers friendly to all budgets and interest, and if you can’t throw in, it would still mean the world to me if you looked around, starred some projects, or even opened up an issue. I need all the encouragement I can get. Thank you!