Software developers have stopped caring about reliability

Of all the principles of software engineering which has fallen by the wayside in the modern “move fast and break things” mentality of assholes modern software developers, reliability is perhaps the most neglected, along with its cousin, robustness. Almost all software that users encounter in $CURRENTYEAR is straight-up broken, and often badly.

Honestly, it’s pretty embarassing. Consider all of the stupid little things you’ve learned how to do in order to work around broken software. Often something as simple as refreshing the page or rebooting the program to knock some sense back into it — most users can handle that. There...

Status update, October 2021

On this dreary morning here in Amsterdam, I’ve made my cup of coffee and snuggled my cat, and so I’m pleased to share some FOSS news with you. Some cool news today! We’re preparing for a new core product launch at sr.ht, cool updates for our secret programming language, plus news for visurf.

Simon Ser has been hard at work on expanding his soju and gamja projects for the purpose of creating a new core sourcehut product: chat.sr.ht. We’re rolling this out in a private beta at first, to seek a fuller understanding of the system’s performance characteristics, to make sure...

How reflection works in Hare

Note: this is a redacted copy of a blog post published on the internal development blog of a new systems programming language. The name of the project and further details are deliberately being kept in confidence until the initial release. You may be able to find it if you look hard enough — you have my thanks in advance for keeping it to yourself. For more information, see “We are building a new systems programming language”.

I’ve just merged support for reflection in Hare. Here’s how it works!

“Reflection” refers to the ability for a program to examine the type system of...

Developers: Let distros do their job

I wrote a post some time ago titled Developers shouldn’t distribute their own software, and after a discussion on the sr.ht IRC channel today, the topic seems worthy of renewed mention. Let’s start with this: what exactly is a software distribution, anyway?

I use “software distribution” here, rather than “Linux distribution”, because it generalizes better. For example, all of the major BSD systems, plus Illumos and others besides, are software distributions, but don’t involve Linux. Some differ further still, sitting on top of another operating system, such as Nix or pkgsrc. What these systems all have in common is that they...

Nitter and other Internet reclamation projects

The world wide web has become an annoying, ultra-commercialized space. Many websites today are prioritizing the interests of the company behind the domain, at the expense of the user’s experience and well-being. This has been a frustrating problem for several years, but lately there’s been a heartwarming trend of users fighting back against the corporate web and stepping up to help and serve each other’s needs in spite of them, through what I’ve come to think of as Internet reclamation projects.

I think the first of these which appeared on my radar was Invidious, which scrapes information off of a YouTube...

Nintendo 64 over S-video

Status update, September 2021

It’s a quiet, foggy morning here in Amsterdam, and here with my fresh mug of coffee and a cuddly cat in my lap, I’d like to share the latest news on my FOSS efforts with you. Grab yourself a warm drink and a cat of your own and let’s get started.

First, a new project: visurf. I announced this a few days ago, but the short of it is that I am building a minimal Wayland-only frontend for the NetSurf web browser which uses vi-inspired keybindings. Since the announcement there has been some good progress: touch support, nsvirc, tabs, key repeat,...

visurf, a web browser based on NetSurf

I’ve started a new side project that I would like to share with you: visurf. visurf, or nsvi, is a NetSurf frontend which provides vi-inspired key bindings and a lightweight Wayland UI with few dependencies. It’s still a work-in-progress, and is not ready for general use yet. I’m letting you know about it today in case you find it interesting and want to help.

NetSurf is a project which has been on my radar for some time. It is a small web browser engine, developed in C independently of the lineage of WebKit and Gecko which defines the modern web today....

Status update, August 2021

Greetings! It’s shaping up to be a beautiful day here in Amsterdam, and I have found the city much to my liking so far. If you’re in Amsterdam and want to grab a beer sometime, send me an email! I’ve been making a lot of new friends here. Meanwhile, I’ve also enjoyed a noticable increase in my productivity levels. Let’s go over the month’s accomplishments.

First, I have spent most of my time on the programming language project. I mentioned in the last update that we broke ground on a codegen rewrite, and yesterday all of our tests finally passed and...

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...