this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
103 points (95.6% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35016 readers
721 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I see a lot about source codes being leaked and I'm wondering how it that you could make something like an exact replica of Super Mario Bros without the source code or how you can't take the finished product and run it back through the compilation software?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Just wait until you see the crazy optimizers for embedded systems. They take the complete code of a system into consideration, and, in a number of compile passes, reuses code snippets from app, libraries, and OS layer to create one big tangled mess that is hard to follow even if you have the source code...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Isn't that still the same exact process as a normal compiler except in the case of embedded systems your OS is like a couple kilobytes large and just compiled along with the rest of your code?

As in, are those "crazy optimizations" not just standard compiler techniques, except applied to the entire OS+applications?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

The main difference is that when you compile a program for Windows, Linux etc., you have an operating system and kernel with their exposed functions/interfaces so even in a compiled program it's pretty easy to find the function calls for opening a file, moving a window, etc. (as long as the developer doesn't add specific steps hiding these calls). But in an embedded system, it's one large mess without any interfaces apart from those directly on the hardware level.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

In a way, yes. But it really creates a mess when the linker starts sharing code between your code of which you have sources, and then jumps in the middle of system code for which you don't have sources. And a pain in the whatever to debug.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Don't you have the code in most cases? Like with e.g. freeRTOS? That's fully open source

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

For a number of reasons people use commercial OSes in this world, too.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Does commercial mean closed source in this context though? It seems like a waste of resources not to provide the source code for an rtos.

Considering how small in size they tend to be + with their power/computational constraints I can't imagine they have very effective DRM in place so it shouldn't take that much to reverse engineer.

May as well just provide the source under some very restrictive license.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Yes, it is closed source, but you can buy a "source license". Which is painfully expensive.