https://theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/
https://lscs-software.com/LsCs-Roadmap.html
"Many of us got our first exposure to Qt on OS/2 in or around 1987."
Uh huh.
> someone always has a use case;
No he doesn't. He's just unhinged. The machines this dude bitches about don't even have a modern C++ compiler nor do they support any kind of display system relevant to Qt. They're never going to be a target for Qt. Further irony is this dude proudly proclaims this fork will support nothing but Wayland and Vulkan on Linux.
"the smaller processors like those in sensors, are 1's complement for a reason."
The "reason" is never explained.
"Why? Because nothing is faster when it comes to straight addition and subtraction of financial values in scaled integers. (Possibly packed decimal too, but uncertain on that.)"
Is this a justification for using Unisys mainframes, or is the implication that they are fastest because of 1's complement? (not that this is even close to being true - as any dinosaurs are decomissioned they're fucking replaced with capable but not TOL commodity Xeon CPU based hardware running emulation, I don't think Unisys makes any non x86 hardware anymore) Anyway, may need to refresh that CS education.
There's some rambling about the justification being data conversion, but what serialization protocols mandate 1's complement anyway, and if those exist someone has already implemented 2's complement supporting libraries for the past 50 years since that has been the overwhelming status quo. We somehow manage to deal with endianness and decimal conversions as well.
"Passing 2's complement data to backend systems or front end sensors expecting 1's complement causes catastrophes."
99.999% of every system MIPS, ARM, x86, Power, etc for the last 40 years uses 2's complement, so this has been the normal state of the world since forever.
Also the enterpriseist of languages, Java somehow has survived mandating 2's complement.
This is all very unhinged.
I'm not holding my breath to see this ancient Qt fork fully converted to "modified" Barr spec but that will be a hoot.
Buuuut then the Unisys thing. Like you say they dont make processors (for the market) and themselves just use Intel now...and even if they make some special secret processors I don't think the IRS is using top secret processors to crunch our taxes, even in the hundreds of millions of record realm with average hundreds of items per record, modern CPUs run at billions of ops per second...so I suspect we are talking some tens of seconds, and some modest amount of RAM (for a server).
The one point he does have is interoperability, which if a lot of (especially medical) equipment uses 1s compliment because its cheaper (in terms of silicon), using "modern" tools is likely to be a bad fit.
Compatability is King, and where medical devices are concerned I would be inclined to agree that not changing things is better than "upgrading" - its all well and good to have two systems until a crisis hits and some doctor plus the wrong sensor into the wrong device...
No it’s completely loony. Note that even the devices he claims to work with for medical devices are off the shelf ARM processors (ie what everybody uses). No commonly used commodity processors for embedded have used 1’s complement in the last 50 years.
> equipment uses 1s compliment because its cheaper (in terms of silicon)
Yeah that makes no sense. If you need an ALU at all, 2s complement requires no more silicon and is simpler to work with. That’s why it was recommended by von Neumann in 1945. 1s complement is only simpler if you don’t have an adder of any kind, which is then not a CPU, certainly not a C/C++ target.
Even the shittiest low end PIC microcontroller from the 70s uses 2s complement.
It is possible that a sensing device with no microprocessor or computation of any kind (ie a bare ADC) may generate values in sign-mag or 1s complement (and it’s usually the former, again how stupid this is) - but this has nothing to do with the C implementation of whatever host connects to it which is certainly 2s. I guarantee you no embedded processor this dude ever worked with in the medical industry used anything other than 2s complement - you would have always needed to do a conversion.
This truly is one of the most absurd issues to get wrapped up on. It might be dementia, sadly.
https://github.com/RolandHughes/ls-cs/blob/master/README.md
Maintaining a fork of a large C++ framework (well of another obscure fork) where the top most selling point is a fixation on avoiding C++20 all because they dropped support for integer representations that have no extant hardware with recent C++ compilers - and any theoretical hardware wouldn’t run this framework anyway, that doesn’t seem well attached to reality.