From the context of #2, I can tell the author didn't mean all of the "?"'s but instead maybe "!".
More likely — or • and they got remapped to ?s by incorrect encodings.
The OS QNX is a hard real-time OS that uses a message passing IPC. I have worked QNX and have written a device driver for QNX.
(...)
attending non-determinism. No "OS function calls" seems way over the top.
It's not over the top; it's traditional embedded device programming, where there isn't an OS available, just a simple BIOS (and I don't mean the MS-DOS one). I suppose kids these days expect even embedded environments to be fairly high end CPUs with full memory management and full OSes... nope. There's even still ladder logic out there — and at least one recent Haskell package aimed at programming for it.