The German government paid $500,000+, to Arch Linux, to re-write Arch Package Management in Rust. Is Germany hoping to inject backdoors, or other spyware, in...
I think the simplest benevolent example of this is what I call “the newline virus”.
Basically, in most programming languages you represent the newline character inside strings with the escape sequence '\n' (or equivalent), so naively you would expect to see a statement translating '\n' into its ASCII code 10 somewhere in the source code of the compiler, like this:
case"\n":
emit(10);
but most likely, it will just say something like instead:
case"\n":
emit('\n');
That is, the fact that '\n' == 10 is nowhere to be seen!
You only need the initial version of the compiler to state it explicitly, all future versions can rely on the previous compiler doing the right thing.
I think the simplest benevolent example of this is what I call “the newline virus”.
Basically, in most programming languages you represent the newline character inside strings with the escape sequence
'\n'(or equivalent), so naively you would expect to see a statement translating'\n'into its ASCII code10somewhere in the source code of the compiler, like this:case "\n": emit(10);but most likely, it will just say something like instead:
case "\n": emit('\n');That is, the fact that
'\n' == 10is nowhere to be seen!You only need the initial version of the compiler to state it explicitly, all future versions can rely on the previous compiler doing the right thing.
yeah great example