Why am I building a programming language in private?

As many readers are aware, I have been working on designing and implementing a systems programming language. This weekend, I’ve been writing a PNG file decoder in it, and over the past week, I have been working on a simple kernel with it as well. I’m very pleased with our progress so far — I recently remarked that this language feels like the language I always wanted, and that’s mission accomplished by any definition I care to consider.

I started the project on December 27th, 2019, just over two years ago, and I have kept it in a semi-private state since. Though I have not given its...

qTox gets funded for a year

Thanks to a generous sponsor, qTox development gets founded for a year! Anthony Bilinski got funded to work full-time for a year and sphaerophoria part-time for a few months. You can read more about this in qTox’s blog post, where Anthony goes into detail on his plans for the year.

Open Source is defined by the OSI's Open Source Definition

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) publishes a document called the Open Source Definition (OSD), which defines the term “open source”. However, there is a small minority of viewpoints within the software community which wishes that this were not so. The most concerning among them are those who wish open source was more commercially favorable to themselves, and themselves alone, such as companies like Elastic.

I disagree with this perspective, and I’d like take a few minutes today to explore several of the most common arguments in favor of this view, and explain why I don’t agree with them. One of the most frustrating complications in this discussion is the...

CPS-1: GFX system internals

Plaid is an evil nightmare product from Security Hell

Plaid is a business that has built a widget that can be embedded in any of their customer’s websites which allows their customers to configure integrations with a list of third-party service providers. To facilitate this, Plaid pops up a widget on their customer’s domain which asks the end-user to type in their username and password for the third-party service provider. If necessary, they will ask for a 2FA code. This is done without the third party’s permission, presumably through a browser emulator and a provider-specific munging shim, and collects the user’s credentials on a domain which is operated by neither the third party nor by Plaid.

The third-party...

DigitalOcean Sponsorship

We would like to thank a cloud hosting company DigitalOcean for sponsoring the Tox project as part of their program for sponsoring open source projects.

DigitalOcean has been providing us with reliable cloud server infrastructure for free since July 2015 — for over 6 years now! They have been very generous with supporting us and a pleasure to work with. Just as an example, in 2018 we asked them for a seemingly outrageous $660 in credits as a budget for that year, which they provided us without any questions asked.

Most of our infrastructure is running on DigitalOcean, including our website, wiki,...

Status update, February 2022

Hello once again! Another month of free software development goes by with lots of progress in all respects.

I will open with some news about godocs.io: version 1.0 of our fork of gddo has been released! Big thanks to Adnan Maolood for his work on this. I’m very pleased that, following our fork, we were not only able to provide continuity for godoc.org, but also to simplify, refactor, and improve the underlying software considerably. Check out Adnan’s blog post for more details.

In programming language news, we have had substantial progress in many respects. One interesting project I’ve started is a Redis protocol implementation:

const conn =...


						
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Framing accessibility in broader terms

Upon hearing the term “accessibility”, many developers call to mind the HTML ARIA attributes and little else. Those who have done some real accessibility work may think of the WCAG guidelines. Some FOSS developers1 may think of AT-SPI. The typical user of these accessibility features is, in the minds of many naive developers, a blind person. Perhaps for those who have worked with WCAG, a slightly more sophisticated understanding of the audience for accessibility tools may include users with a greater variety of vision-related problems, motor impairments, or similar needs.

Many developers2 frame accessibility in these terms, as a list of boxes to tick off, or specific industry tools which,...

2022-02-11

dmenu 5.1 released: download

Free software licenses explained: MIT

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to write explaining how various free and open source software licenses work, and what that means for you as a user or developer of that software. Today we’ll look at the MIT license, also sometimes referred to as the X11 or Expat license.

The MIT license is:

This means that the license upholds the four essential freedoms of free software (the right to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software) and all of the terms of the open source definition (largely the same). Further...