Efficiently sandboxing Firefox by compiling potentially vulnerable libraries to wasm, and then compiling wasm to C! https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/12/webassembly-and-back-again-fine-grained-sandboxing-in-firefox-95/
miniblog.
On the remarkable inertia of database and programming language choices early in the life of a company: https://brandur.org/fragments/early-tech-decisions
I get a lot of value from tech/PL microblogging as @_wilfredh on Twitter, and often get interesting comments. I'm not sure how much the new CEO will affect that.
I also cross-post to https://mastodon.social/@wilfredh and have interesting discussions there too. Both are worthwhile today.
I'm experimenting with line number styling in difftastic. The first screenshot is the old version, and the second screenshot shows the new.
I want line numbers to be visually distinct from content. The new version is using dim text for unchanged lines, and bold otherwise.
Experience report on writing the same small web app in C#, Deno, Go, Elixir, Rust and Scala: https://github.com/losvedir/transit-lang-cmp
Contrasting a Rust specification (being worked on) with a Rust ISO standard (which may not work as well as the existing RFC process), and backward compatibility promises: https://blog.m-ou.se/rust-standard/
(The entire Rust ecosystem is run against new rustc versions surprisingly often too)
A live demo of how you edit BASIC code (its REPL equivalent) inside a thoughtful article on how we interact with programming languages: https://tomasp.net/commodore64/
RISC features for ISAs, and which design choices have stood the test of time: https://wiki.alopex.li/RiscIn2022
Bidirectional type checking versus Hindley-Milner type checking, with some worked examples of subtyping: https://www.haskellforall.com/2022/06/the-appeal-of-bidirectional-type.html
The tradeoffs of type system design, and thinking about a gradual type checker for Elixir:
https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2022/10/05/my-future-with-elixir-set-theoretic-types/
Eglot, an LSP client for Emacs, is now a built-in package! https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-10/msg01609.html
Exploring the design space and tradeoffs of programming language syntax, and syntactic sugar vs syntactic salt:
https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/syntaxdesign/
On the remarkably large feature set of format strings in common lisp, and comparing with an s-expression based syntax alternative: http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/format-stinks.html
On the remarkably large feature set of format strings in common lisp, and comparing with an s-expression based syntax alternative: https://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dvm/format-stinks.html
Today I learnt about the NonNull<T> type in Rust: https://doc.rust-lang.org/nightly/core/ptr/struct.NonNull.html
It's a *mut T that is never null. Rust is trusting you even more than a normal *mut T, which is slightly daunting.
Some fun examples of things you can do with type inference in Rust, from a GCC-rust contributor.
I've released difftastic 0.37!
* Improved performance, both runtime and memory usage (thanks to QuarticCat)
* Added --context=N to adjust how many contextual lines are shown
* Better Swift support
* The manual is now available in Chinese
Perhaps the biggest driver of docs success is prestige. How cool are the docs tools, and how proud are you to have contributed to the docs?
Which tools do this best? Racket docs look pretty great, for example.
The different layers of the Nix ecosystem, and the overlay system to allow downstream users to override (c.f. dynamic binding): https://web.archive.org/web/20220908002605/https://www.haskellforall.com/2022/08/stop-calling-everything-nix.html
IDEA's Fleet editor is reminiscent of GitHub Spaces: a web-first IDE that enables users to start coding without needing to set up the environment locally on their machine: https://blog.jetbrains.com/blog/2021/11/29/welcome-to-fleet/
Interesting to see design convergence in this space.
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