13 January 2020
or, “How I put too much time into making an 8-bit ISA and accompanying virtual machine”
It all started with my colleague Cassie having fun designing a toy 8-bit ISA (“instruction set architecture”). I love encoding tables (I helped out a little with the one for Swift’s String struct representation), and I did assignments in college involving simplified CPUs. So I started thinking about what it would be like to write a program in Cassie’s ISA…and decided its four registers were too limited for me. How could I get up to 8 registers while still keeping most of the instructions in a single byte?
(Continue reading…)
Posted in Technical.
Tags:
Assembly,
Source code
24 December 2019
In Apple’s TN2206, “macOS Code Signing in Depth”, there’s a section about “Checking Gatekeeper Compliance”.
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Package your program the way you ship it, such as in a disk image.
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Download it from its website, or mail it to yourself, or send it to yourself using AirDrop or Message. This will quarantine the downloaded copy. This is necessary to trigger the Gatekeeper check as Gatekeeper only checks quarantined files the first time they’re opened.
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Drag-install your app and launch it.
I figured jumping through a “download” or “send” step was overkill. Surely there’s a way to get the same effect programmatically, right?
(Continue reading…)
Posted in Technical.
Tags:
Mac OS X,
Source code
01 November 2019
After seven years, I’m leaving Apple. Today (November 1) is my last day in office.
Those seven years have been good for me. I started off on the Clang Static Analyzer, and eventually moved onto the secret project that became Swift. As someone interested in programming languages and compilers, Swift was…I don’t want to say the chance of a lifetime, but maybe the chance of a decade, at least. I got to shape and contribute to a language used by people all over the world during its early years, and it’s been a heck of an experience. To everyone in the Swift community, thank you and also I’m sorry for the bugs.
(Continue reading…)
Posted in Personal.
Tags:
Meta,
Apple,
Swift
