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Status update, October 2022

After a few busy and stressful months, I decided to set aside October to rest. Of course, for me, rest does not mean a cessation of programming, but rather a shift in priorities towards more fun and experimental projects. Consequently, it has been a great month for Helios!
Hare upstream has enjoyed some minor improvements, such as from Pierre Curto’s patch to support parsing IPv6 addresses with a port (e.g. “[::1]:80”) and Kirill Primak’s improvements to the UTF-8 decoder. On the whole, improvements have been conservative. However, queued up for integration once qbe upstream support is merged is support for @threadlocal...
In praise of ffmpeg
My last “In praise of” article covered qemu, a project founded by Fabrice Bellard, and today I want to take a look at another work by Bellard: ffmpeg. Bellard has a knack for building high-quality software which solves a problem so well that every other solution becomes obsolete shortly thereafter, and ffmpeg is no exception.
ffmpeg has been described as the Swiss army knife of multimedia. It incorporates hundreds of video, audio, and image decoders and encoders, muxers and demuxers, filters and devices. It provides a CLI and a set of libraries for working with its tools, and is the core...
2022-10-04
dmenu 5.2 released: download dwm 6.4 released: download ii 2.0 released: download sic 1.3 released: download slock 1.5 released: download st 0.9 released: download tabbed 0.7 released: download
Does Rust belong in the Linux kernel?
I am known to be a bit of a polemic when it comes to Rust. I will be forthright with the fact that I don’t particularly care for Rust, and that my public criticisms of it might set up many readers with a reluctance to endure yet another Rust Hot Take from my blog. My answer to the question posed in the title is, of course, “no”. However, let me assuage some of your fears by answering a different question first: does Hare belong in the Linux kernel?
If I should owe my allegiance to any programming language, it would be...
Notes from kernel hacking in Hare, part 2: multi-threading

I have long promised that Hare would not have multi-threading, and it seems that I have broken that promise. However, I have remained true to the not-invented-here approach which is typical of my style by introducing it only after designing an entire kernel to implement it on top of.1
For some background, Helios is a micro-kernel written in Hare. In addition to the project, the Vulcan system is a small userspace designed to test the kernel.
A picture of a laptop running Helios and showing the results of the Vulcan test suite
While I don’t anticipate multi-threaded processes playing a huge role in...
The phrase "open source" (still) matters
In 1988, “Resin Identification Codes” were introduced by the plastic industry. These look exactly like the recycling symbol ♺, which is not trademarked or regulated, except that a number is enclosed within the triangle. These symbols simply identify what kind of plastic was used. The vast majority of plastic is non-recyclable, but has one of these symbols on it to suggest otherwise. This is a deceptive business practice which exploits the consumer’s understanding of the recycling symbol to trick them into buying more plastic products.
The meaning of the term “open source” is broadly understood to be defined by the Open...