Principle Consultant, Iconoclast Consulting
Role: Principal Consultant
Iconoclast Consulting
March 2019 – Present
Summary
Iconoclast’s (iconoclast.consulting) mission is to challenge existing thinking and practices of software development to achieve markedly improved performance and results. Iconoclast’s work is defining and answering the hard questions.
Should we use domain specific languages (DSL) implemented in C++?
The C++ language offers many useful features. Because of backwards compatibility language syntax has become very complex relative to other contemporary languages. Would we be better off creating a DSL for our work/code-base/product and implementing it in C++ via a pre-processor?
What behaviors encourage agility?
This work is a precursor to Agility Elements and explores the building blocks of agile practice.
Project metrics A frequent question is what project metrics can we use with agile projects. The result of this project are four metrics we can use to assess agile work:
- Time to adapt organizational structure
- Time to implement decisions
- Time to remove impediments
- Time to act on feedback
C code to Rust transpiler project, project Rawkus (https://github.com/RobertMacGregor/rawkus)
C code has become a de facto standard for systems programming and beyond, and its use is widespread. Although the C language has evolved it has introduced failure mechanisms into code from embedded systems to air traffic control, banking, and safety critical systems. The Rust language offers a more stringent environment for code development that results in safer runtime behavior. Converting the World’s large code base of C code to Rust has become desirable.
Project Rawkus provides an automated translation of C code to Rust. Current progress has achieved a C compiler for C11 (Antlr) that outputs into a graph database (Tinkerpop). The next step is Rust code generation, from data in the graph database, using rules and heuristics.
With the advent of easily accessed AI made this project’s approach redundant because it is easier to get an AI translation of C code to Rust than building a transpiler.