Tips for debugging your new programming language

Say you’re building a new (compiled) programming language from scratch. You’ll inevitably have to debug programs written in it, and worse, many of these problems will lead you into deep magic, as you uncover problems with your compiler or runtime. And as you find yourself diving into the arcane arts, your tools may be painfully lacking: how do you debug code written in a language for which debuggers and other tooling simply has not been written yet?

In the implementation of my own programming language, I have faced this problem many times, and developed, by necessity, some skills around debugging with crippled tools that may lack an awareness...

Police to begin regular, warrant-free searches of homes for child abuse material

The Federal Bureau of Investigations announced a new initiative today to combat the proliferation of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) in the United States. Starting next year, police will be conducting regular searches of US homes, as often as once or twice per week per home, to find child sexual abuse materials. This initiative will bring more child abusers to justice and help abuse victims to find solace in the knowledge that records of their abuse are not being shared in perpetuity.

To facilitate frequent and convenient searches, the FBI will be working with lock manufacturers to institute a new standard for home locks in the United States which...

proxy.golang.org allows many Go packages to be silently broken

GOPROXY (or proxy.golang.org) is a service through which all “go get” commands (and other module downloads) are routed. It may speed up some operations by providing a cache, and it publishes checksums and an “index” of all Go packages; but this is done at the cost of sending details of all of your module downloads to Google and imposing extra steps when using Go packages from an intranet.

This cache never expires, which can cause some problems: you can keep fetching a module from proxy.golang.org long after the upstream version has disappeared. The upstream author probably had a good reason for removing a version! Because I set GOPROXY=direct in...

In praise of PostgreSQL

After writing Praise for Alpine Linux, I have decided to continue writing more articles in praise of good software. Today, I’d like to tell you a bit about PostgreSQL.

Many people don’t understand how old Postgres truly is: the first release1 was in July of 1996. It used this logo:

After 25 years of persistence, and a better logo design, Postgres stands today as one of the most significant pillars of profound achievement in free software, alongside the likes of Linux and Firefox. PostgreSQL has taken a complex problem and solved it to such an effective degree that all of its competitors are essentially obsolete, perhaps with the exception...

2021-07-30

svkbd 0.4 released: download

My wish-list for the next YAML

YAML is both universally used, and universally reviled. It has a lot of problems, but it also is so useful in solving specific tasks that it’s hard to replace. Some new kids on the block (such as TOML) have successfully taken over a portion of its market share, but it remains in force in places where those alternatives show their weaknesses.

I think it’s clear to most that YAML is in dire need of replacement, which is why many have tried. But many have also failed. So what are the key features of YAML which demonstrate its strengths, and key weaknesses that could be improved upon?

Let’s start with...

Status update, July 2021

Hallo uit Nederland! I’m writing to you from a temporary workstation in Amsterdam, pending the installation of a better one that I’ll put together after I visit a furniture store today. I’ve had to slow a few things down somewhat while I prepare for this move, and I’ll continue to be slower for some time following it, but things are moving along regardless.

One point of note is that the maintainer for aerc, Reto Brunner, has stepped down from his role. I’m looking for someone new to fill his shoes; please let me know if you are interested.

As far as the language project is concerned, there has...

Comment on Curve extraction plugin by hari haran

i could not understand anything in the paper ,i dont know how can i implement until understand it

Is GitHub a derivative work of GPL'd software?

GitHub recently announced a tool called Copilot, a tool which uses machine learning to provide code suggestions, inciting no small degree of controversy. One particular facet of the ensuing discussion piques my curiosity: what happens if the model was trained using software licensed with the GNU General Public License?

Disclaimer: I am the founder of a company which competes with GitHub.

The GPL is among a family of licenses considered “copyleft”, which are characterized by their “viral” nature. In particular, the trait common to copyleft works is the requirement that “derivative works” are required to publish their new work under the same terms as the original copyleft license. Some weak...

How does IRC's federation model compare to ActivityPub?

Today’s federated revolution is led by ActivityPub, leading to the rise of services like Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, and more. These new technologies have a particular approach to federation, which is coloring perceptions on what it actually means for a system to be federated at all. Today’s post will explain how Internet Relay Chat (IRC), a technology first introduced in the late 1980’s, does federation differently, and why.

As IRC has aged, many users today have only ever used a few networks, such as Liberachat (or Freenode, up until several weeks ago), which use a particular IRC model which does not, at first glance, appear to utilize federation. After all, everyone...