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Where are all the reverse engineers, compiler devs, and OS devs at!? There must be some people interested in this stuff around these parts...
(Please don't recommend hashtags. It's an intentional omission, to avoid the "hacker bros".)
Oh wow, that's a lot of reactions! Didn't expect that 
Thanks for all the introductions! It'll take me a while to go through everyone 
I should clarify for those who followed me (thank you!)... Professionally I'm a systems and graphics dev. The things in the OP are additional interests, and I'm certainly no expert there.
I just posted some stuff earlier today, which reminded me how much I'm outside the low level dev community. So this was my attempt to find others who share this interest 
@lunarood i'm interested in new models of linking for e.g. shading symbols by version or supporting languages with compile-time polymorphism or especially to improve performance via smart caching but i'm not terribly familiar with standard linking
@hipsterelectron Ah, that's cool!
No need for deep familiarity with this particular matter (I knew practically nothing about ELF until last week, lol). I'm just looking for people with these kinds of interests in general, so that these random posts don't go to waste
Sometimes I want to post silly stuff related to low level programming, to perhaps spark some conversation or at least amuse someone, but it can feel like it's too niche 
@lunarood this happens to me quite a lot with my work on parsing and regex (i also worry people feel unqualified to comment) and it's very lonely. but if i'm obnoxious enough about it ppl often at least give me excuses to reframe the problem in different terms esp since lots of ppl have surface familiarity and have experienced the problems i'm hoping (claiming) to fix. so engaging people on like the problems they have with the stuff you're working on can definitely be generative imho
@hipsterelectron For sure! I definitely try to do that when it comes to problems I'm solving or trying to solve!
But sometimes I just want to post a silly (though extremely niche) thing, for the sake of amusement. The problem is finding the people that would be amused
I guess it's partly a matter of reach. My account here is still pretty small, so just from a probabilistic perspective, a niche post is unlikely to be seen by someone sharing the same interest.
@lunarood i have seen lots of very interesting people doing compiler stuff on your instance it surprised me the first time
@hipsterelectron Actually yeah, that's true.
Idk, there's just some kind of disconnect somewhere. I know plenty of graphics people to mutually engage with, but I seem to struggle to break into the low level, non-graphics, systems dev communies.
I guess I should just post more. Mastodon in general has been pretty slow for me, since moving here coincided with me posting a lot less, due to unrelated circumstances.
But anyway... we'll see 
@hipsterelectron @lunarood Cool, that's exactly my interest too! We should exchange notes (if you like)!
Are you on the Coffee Compiler Club discord?
@hipsterelectron @lunarood Great! Then I will ask people to invite you as soon as I'm back from travel!
@hipsterelectron @lunarood One thing that really grinds my gears is the naming "native" code.
<rant> it's only "native" in the sense of being cobbled together in the 60ies and fought off any attempt of modernization for the past decades. I mean, even C++ outstripped its "native" capabilities at its inception!!! </rant>
@lunarood 
hobbyist reverse-engineer here!
focus is on video game preservation, but I tend to take anything apart that I have some interest in!
@lunarood (sort of) reverse engineer here.
@lunarood I'm retired now, but I worked on compilers early in my career, and a lot of low level hardware/software projects from networking to high performance compute and i/o systems, and I'm still generally interested in hearing and chatting about that sort of stuff.
@minkcv I mean, I'm not really looking for anything in particular. Just, like, people who are into some stuff. That said, what you linked certainly seems to fall in the general vicinity of the some stuff category
@lunarood i do a fair bit of reverse engineering and i did some osdev and compiler dev a while ago as a hobby, but haven't in a while
@lunarood i pretend to know what i’m doing sometimes
@domi OMG! Same! 
@lunarood JIT-compiler-understanderer here! Making tools to help Java devs grok what happened at runtime 
@lunarood I post more electronics engineering than reverse engineering these days, but do RE on hw/sw, and have dabbled in osdev and language toolchain dev. plenty of other folks round here too!
@gsuberland Wait, I thought I was following you already! I see you around all the time, so I guess our respective circles have some overlap.
@lunarood hah, I do that all the time :D
, 
; Soni L. @lunarood we work on a few compilers we guess
possibly too many
we've been trying to get into osdev (even if just to package a linux distro...) but we find it overwhelming
@lunarood meow! i work mostly on FPGAs, which includes both reverse engineering and compilers
@lunarood I’m mostly doing compiler related work these days, mainly llvm-bolt and V8 javascript JIT
@lunarood wrote compilers and understood linking well once upon a time, especially for ARM architecture. A little rusty now, I've been working on wikitext parsing for a decade.
@lunarood hewwo, i happen to have all of those skills
unusually for our local social bubble, i have a blend of academia and self-taught skills. not very good at communities though but would certainly like to be part of more
@r Hi!
Do you mean the social bubble around you? A mix of academia and self-taught skills seems to be the standard from where I'm standing (wait... or was that a sarcastic "unusually"?)
@lunarood the social bubble around me seems to be much heavier on the self-taught skills. the people we know with more academia skills tended to end up in normie job roles
@r I see. Well, I do know a lot of people who went through academia, but then ended up working in completely different fields later on.
I'm mostly self-taught, so I guess I'm not really expanding your academic circle in that sense. But I think there's a pretty good mix here on fedi, and I've been glad to find lots of receptive, non-gatekeepy academics and non-academics alike.
@lunarood hey, that's me -- although the compilers is more dayjob now, definitely been reversing for almost as long as I've been forward-engineering
@lunarood well i used to be a compiler dev.. until about 5 months ago.. if that helps
@mrsbeanbag Wait, what happened 5 months ago? 
@mrsbeanbag Oh no, sorry to hear! (I'm assuming you're talking about job loss.)
I was a bit thrown off by "used to be a compiler dev", as I conceptualise "being something" more as your primary skills, rather than what you are currently employed as
@lunarood sorry if that seemed obtuse, but "primary skills" is a surprising concept to me. i've done a lot of different things. compiler dev was just the last job i had. it's an interesting topic though.
@mrsbeanbag Oh, no need to apologise, I was just worried you somehow lost your skills or something 
And you're right! "Primary skills" was just my attempt at self-definition, as I don't really relate to the employment angle (by that definition I'd be a 3D artist, which would be a huge misrepresentation ), but I do also find it hard to define "primary skills".
Ultimately the whole concept of "being" a narrow and specific thing is kinda nonsense. My OP was more about "are you into this?".
@lunarood OS and compiler dev here.
I'm a bit of an odd one since I work at Microsoft to bring more #rust into Windows.
Lately I've also been doing a bunch of contributions to #llvm https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pulls?q=is%3Apr+author%3Adpaoliello
@lunarood I'm doing language design focused on *not* doing exciting new things, but doing things correctly where we have known for 50 years how to do them correctly.
https://core-lang.dev if you are interested.
@soc Funny you should mention that! Just yesterday, I posted something related: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@lunarood/113965062191463290
@lunarood Not a reverse engineer, but I am the other two: Been an LLVM committer since 2008, implemented CHERI C, did the first Objective-C support in clang, and a few other things, so I can probably claim to be a compiler dev (though these days I do more managing of compiler devs than compiler dev work). Wrote the book on Xen, was elected to the FreeBSD core team twice, and am now maintainer of an RTOS (and do still write code, not just manage people who do).
I am also responsible for the ISA that our compiler and RTOS target. People who care about software should build their own hardware.
@lunarood meow :3
I'm working on rustc (although I don't pay much).