Implementing a MIME database in XXXX

This is a (redacted) post from the internal blog of a new systems programming language we’re developing. The project is being kept under wraps until we’re done with it, so for this post I’ll be calling it XXXX. If you are interested in participating, send me an email with some details about your background and I’ll get back to you.

Recently, I have been working on implementing a parser for media types (commonly called MIME types) and a database which maps media types to file extensions and vice-versa. I thought this would be an interesting module to blog about, given that it’s only about 250 lines of...

Pine64 should re-evaluate their community priorities

Pine64 has a really interesting idea: make cheap hardware with low margins, get it into the hands of the FOSS community, and let them come up with the software. No one has ever done this before, at least not on this scale, and it’s a really neat idea! Pine64 is doing a lot to support the FOSS community bringing up its hardware, but I’m afraid that I have to ask them to do a bit more.

There’s a handful of different roles that need to be filled in on the software side of things to get this ecosystem going. Ordered from most to least important, these are...

Status update, January 2022

Happy New Year! I had a lovely time in Amsterdam. No one had prepared me for the (apparently infamous) fireworks culture of the Netherlands. I thought it was really cool.

Our programming language continues to improve apace. Our cryptography suite now includes Argon2, Salsa20/XSalsa20, ChaCha20/XChaCha20, and Poly1305, and based on these functions we have added libsodium-style high-level cryptographic utilities for AEAD and key derivation, with stream encryption, message signing and verification, and key exchange coming soon. We have also laid out the priorities for future crypto work towards supporting TLS, and on the way we expect to have ed25519/x25519 and Diffie-Hellman added soon. Perhaps enough to implement an SSH client?

I...

The RISC-V experience

I’m writing to you from a Sway session on Alpine Linux, which is to say from a setup quite similar to the one I usually write blog posts on, save for one important factor: a RISC-V CPU.

I’ll state upfront that what I’m using is not a very practical system. What I’m going to describe is all of the impractical hacks and workarounds I have used to build a “useful” RISC-V system on which I can mostly conduct my usual work. It has been an interesting exercise, and it bodes well for the future of RISC-V, but for all practical purposes the promise of RISC-V still lives...

Street Fighter 2: Sound System Internals

2022-01-07

dwm 6.3 released: download ii 1.9 released: download st 0.8.5 released: download svkbd 0.4.1 released: download

Breaking down a small language design proposal

We are developing a new systems programming language. The name is a secret, so we’ll call it xxxx instead. In xxxx, we have a general requirement that all variables must be initialized. This is fine for the simple case, such as “let x: int = 10”. But, it does not always work well. Let’s say that you want to set aside a large buffer for I/O:

let x: [1024]int = [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, // ...

This can clearly get out of hand. To address this problem, we added the “…” operator:

let x: [1024]int = [0...];
let y: *[1024]int = alloc([0...]);

This example demonstrates...

Примеры ассемблерного кода для ZX Spectrum

Я не буду делать длинное вступление. Один знакомый хакер однажды сказал, что 10 строк кода могут быть понятнее и интереснее, чем 1000 слов объяснений. Все эти примеры написаны на ассемблере для архитектуры Z80 и запускаются на ретро-компьютере ZX Spectrum 48k.

Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

Six years ago, I wrote a post speaking out against the use of Slack for the instant messaging needs of FOSS projects. In retrospect, this article is not very good, and in the years since, another proprietary chat fad has stepped up to bat: Discord. It’s time to revisit this discussion.

In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It...

Please use me as a resource

I write a lot of blog posts about my ideas,1 some of which are even good ideas. Some of these ideas stick, and many readers have attempted to put them into practice, taking on challenges like starting a business in FOSS or stepping up to be leaders in their communities. It makes me proud to see the difference you’re making, and I’m honored to have inspired many of you.

I’m sitting here on my soapbox shouting into the void, but I also want to work with you one-on-one. Here are some things people have reached out to me for: