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nicholatian

An American informatician, game designer and writer.

Funding Links: https://github.com/sponsors/nicholatian

Name: Alexander Nicholi‮
Location: Research Triangle
Company: Xion Megatrends LLC
Kind: user
Followers: 7
Following: 12
Total stars: 42
Repositories count: 26
Created at: 2023-11-12T23:29:49.717Z
Updated at: 2024-12-06T16:28:31.543Z
Last synced at: 2024-12-06T16:28:31.543Z

GitHub Sponsors Profile

Welcome to the machine.
This is my sponsorship profile. Here I’d like to convince you to support my work.
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.