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:

Street Fighter 2: Spin when you can't

Street Fighter 2: Subtile accurate animation