"A hacker, a lecturer, a father" // Adjunct faculty at @NCKU_official
Taipei/Tainan, Taiwan
Joined June 2007
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The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide (#LKMPG) got 5000+ stars on GitHub. Thank all the contributors and promoters. We are moving forward to Linux v6.x support. Rust LKM examples will appear later.
github.com/sysprog21/lkmpg
Jim Huang retweeted
In 1994, software was dead. People told me programming was for nerds and that I should become a doctor or a lawyer instead.
In 2004, software was dead. People told me that someone from India would take my job for $5/hour.
In 2014, software was dead. People told me that no-code was going to kill every job and doom my career.
In 2024, software was dead with Devin, Windsurf, Copilot, and OpenAI o1.
We kill software every 10 years, and yet the demand for good Software Engineers has never been higher.
Jim Huang retweeted
The operational risk isn't "nobody reads it" — it's "nobody can verify it." Once the corpus exceeds what a human can load into working memory, correctness has to shift from review to verification: formal specs, property-based tests, fuzzing, model checkers. The lever that keeps safety intact while code scales past human readability is the verification toolchain (KLEE, CBMC, Frama-C, liquid types, TLA+). The teams that ship unreadable code without burning down production aren't the ones with bigger teams — they're the ones that replaced "a human read this diff" with a proof or a failing property. Everything else is just hoping the blind spot didn't overlap the edge case.
Jim Huang retweeted
Leslie Lamport is one of the greatest computer scientists alive.
In the 1980s, he wanted to write a book about concurrency, needed better macros for TeX, and spent several months developing LaTeX which mathematicians, physicists, and researchers around the world still use today.
The book never got written.
Then he continued his groundbreaking work in distributed systems theory (Paxos, logical clocks, Byzantine fault tolerance).
Some people's side projects become entire industries.
C is a programming language to honor "What You See Is What You Get" (WYSIWYG).
Jim Huang retweeted
The Singularity:
1950: Real programmers wire their own circuits.
1985: Real programmers write their own assembly.
2010: Real programmers write their own C.
2026: Real programmers write their own Python.
2027: Real programmers write their own prompts.
Jim Huang retweeted
One constant rules continuous change: the same e that compounds interest without bound also equals its own derivative and sums to itself via factorials.
e = lim (1 + 1/n)^n as n→∞
e = ∑_{n=0}^∞ 1/n!
d/dx e^x = e^x
∫_1^e (1/t) dt = 1
From population models and radioactive decay to neural nets and option pricing, continuous growth always traces back to this single base. Nature’s compounding engine is written in e.
Jim Huang retweeted
The computer that landed Apollo 11 on the Moon computed sine with a polynomial of just three terms.
sin(πx/2) ≈ 2((C₅x² + C₃)x² + C₁)x, used only for |x| ≤ 1.
The constants are not Taylor coefficients. Taylor's C₃ would be −0.3229820, the AGC stored −0.3216147, nudged so the error wiggles across the interval instead of piling up at the end.
Result: max error 1.1×10⁻⁴ versus 4.5×10⁻³ for Taylor, about 40 times better at the same cost.
Good engineering often means choosing better constants.
Jim Huang retweeted
Back to basics! Let's copy a string in C and then see how it's done in assembly language!
// How to copy a string in C and assembly:
In C:
while ((*dst++ = *src++))
;
// In PDP-11 assembly, a single instruction in a loop does it, because it has pre- and post-increment operations built into the instruction itself.
; R0 = src, R1 = dst
10$: MOVB (R0)+,(R1)+
BNE 10$
// In X86 assembly, REP MOVSB would do it if you knew the length, but you don't, so:
; RSI = src, RDI = dst, direction flag clear
copy:
lodsb ; AL = *src++
stosb ; *dst++ = AL
test al, al
jnz copy
Jim Huang retweeted
I just released mold 3.0.0! This is the first Rust version of mold, rewritten from C++ with performance on par with 2.42.1. The goal of mold 3.x is to close the remaining GNU ld compatibility gaps and make mold the default linker in Linux distros. github.com/rui314/mold/relea…
