I will be moving to the Netherlands

I had been planning a move to the Netherlands for a while, at least until a large COVID-shaped wrench was thrown into the gears. However, I was fully vaccinated by early April, and there are signs of the border opening up now, so my plans have been slowly getting back on track. I sent off my visa application today, and assuming I can navigate the pandemic-modified procedures, I should be able to make my move fairly soon. It’s a little bit intimidating, but I am looking forward to it!

Quick note: I am looking for temporary housing in NL; somewhere I can stay for 6-12 months with a...

Build your project in our new language

Do you have a new systems programming project on your todo list? If you’re feeling adventurous, I would like you to give it a crack in our new systems programming language, and to use it to drive improvements in the less-developed areas of our standard library.

Note: we have enough projects on board now. Keep an eye on the blog, I’ll publish another announcement when we’re ready for more.

Are you making a new coreutils implementation? A little OS kernel? A new shell? A GUI toolkit? Database system? Web server? Whatever your systems programming use-case, we think that our language is likely to be a good fit for...

Tox has moved to Libera Chat IRC

Due to the recent takeover of Freenode IRC[1] and Tox IRC channels being hostilely taken over by the new Freenode staff without any prior notice[2], we have moved our IRC presence to Libera Chat IRC[3]. All Tox IRC channels have moved to Libera. Any Tox channel you see on Freenode (or any other network) is not official. You can see the up-to-date list of our IRC channels on the wiki[4].

We are not the only project that has made the switch. Many high-profile projects and communities have left Freenode for Libera: Arch Linux[5], curl[6], Django[7], FFmpeg[8], Gentoo[9][10], Haskell[11], NGINX[12], PostgreSQL[13], Python[14],...

Using io_uring to make a high-performance... finger server

I’m working on adding a wrapper for the Linux io_uring interface to my secret programming language project. To help learn more about io_uring and to test out the interface I was designing, I needed a small project whose design was well-suited for the value-add of io_uring. The Finger protocol is perfect for this! After being designed in the 70’s and then completely forgotten about for 50 years, it’s the perfect small and simple network protocol to test drive this new interface with.

In short, finger will reach out to a remote server and ask for information about a user. It was used back in the day to find...

How to write release notes

Release notes are a concept most of us are familiar with. When a new software release is prepared, the release notes tell you what changed, so you understand what you can expect and how to prepare for the update. They are also occasionally used to facilitate conversations:

Many of the people tasked with writing release notes have never found themselves on that side of the screen before. If that describes you, I would like to offer some advice on how to nail it. Note that this mostly applies to free and open source software, which is the only kind of software which is valid.

So, it’s release day,...

aerc, mbsync, and postfix for maximum comfy offline email

I am the original author of the aerc mail client, though my official relationship with it today is marginal at best. I think that, with hindsight, I’ve come to understand that the “always online” approach of aerc’s IMAP implementation is less than ideal. The next email client (which will exist at some point!) will improve on this design, but, since it’s still my favorite email client despite these flaws, they will have to be worked around.

To this end, I have updated my personal aerc setup to take advantage of its Maildir support instead of having it use IMAP directly, then delegate IMAP to mbsync. This brings a...

Прощай YouCompleteMe, привет COC.VIM

Устал от борьбы с YouCompleteMe и решил окончательно прибраться на coc.vim + coc-clangd. Ранее я уже делал попытки использовать coc.vim в связке с ccls, но каждый раз откатывался на монструозный, но привычный YCM. Из плюсов ccls можно выделить удобство настройки …

The post Прощай YouCompleteMe, привет COC.VIM appeared first on Ugolnik's blog.

Status update, May 2021

Hello! This update is a bit late. I was travelling all day yesterday without internet, so I could not prepare these. After my sister and I got vaccinated, I took a trip to visit her at her home in beautiful Hawaii — it felt great after a year of being trapped within these same four walls. I hope you get that vaccine and things start to improve for you, too!

In SourceHut news, I’ve completed and shipped the first version of the builds.sr.ht GraphQL API. Another update, implementing the write functionality, will be shipping shortly, once the code review is complete. The next one up for a GraphQL...

Observing my cellphone switch towers

Pinebook Pro review

I received the original Pinebook for free from the good folks at Pine64 a few years ago, when I visited Berlin to work with the KDE developers. Honestly, I was underwhelmed. The performance was abysmal and ARM is a nightmare to work with. For these reasons, I was skeptical when I bought the Pinebook Pro. I have also spoken of my disdain for modern laptops in general before: the state of laptops in $CURRENTYEAR is abysmal. As such, I have been using a ThinkPad X200, an 11 year old laptop, as my sole laptop for several years now.

I am pleased to share that the Pinebook Pro...