Week 4 Session: Which interface stops you first?

Compile several things that have no business compiling, and find the pattern in how they fail

15 March 2027

The room needs variety this week, because the finding is a pattern and one person cannot see it alone. Take one from each band if you can:

• Pure compute — a compression or hashing library, a solver, a parser
• Terminal-shaped — a small CLI utility that reads stdin and writes stdout
• Blocking or re-entrant — anything with a modal loop, a sleep, or a synchronous wait
• Networked — anything that opens a socket, and ideally anything that listens
• Graphical — an SDL or OpenGL demo

Compile it. Record the first thing that stopped you, and classify it: missing symbol, unsupported syscall, an API that exists but does nothing, a link that succeeds and a binary that hangs.

Then pool the results on the board in the order they broke. The point of the hour is the shape of that list, not any individual failure — and whether the room’s ordering matches the one the lecture claimed.

If your target is a JavaScript runtime and none of this applies to it, take something else. But answer the week’s question about your target anyway, in one sentence, because Assignment 1 is due this week and this is the question it is asking.