miniblog.

The new iphone is shipping with x86 chips for the baseband processor!

Babel is dropping the 'stage-N' presets in favour of specific plugins for features: https://babeljs.io/blog/2018/07/27/removing-babels-stage-presets Iterating on PL features, especially with new syntax, is hard! Seems like they're striking a good balance.

Finding bugs in LLVM IR optimisers: programmatically generate small (loop free, no control flow) functions, run your favourite middle end passes, and verify the output is equivalent! https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1510 (Uses Alive to verify and 4000 CPUs of compute.)

Awesome, there's a whole miniKanren implementation in emacs lisp! https://github.com/nickdrozd/reazon This gives you logic programming somewhat like Prolog or Clojure's core.logic.

Fn lightning talk on using provenance data to improve Haskell type errors: https://youtu.be/rdVqQUOvxSU

A growing range of useful collection data types for Pharo! https://pharoweekly.wordpress.com/2018/05/04/containers-now-on-github/ Good examples of Smalltalk best code practices too.

Interesting @lambda_conf talk showing how Dialyzer ('discrepancy analyzer') offers gradual typing for Erlang and Elixir: https://youtu.be/FXCMiQWnWu0 It's a neat type system: it uses 'success typing', (it assumes you're correct) and exotic features like ranges and non-empty lists!

Type signatures are optional in Haskell, but in OCaml you can even specify partial signatures (e.g. just one parameter). Maybe return types are more valuable to annotate? I can often guess params based on the name, but I have to read the function body for the result.

Exploring making websites faster by preloading pages that an ML algorithm thinks they're likely to visit next: https://github.com/guess-js/guess/blob/master/README.md

A fun Racket library that allows you to express different retry patterns (higher-order function calls really) for unreliable functions: https://docs.racket-lang.org/retry/retry-guide.html

Really interesting to see that YouTube has shipped 'time spent' feature. However, it's out by one order of magnitude!

Fabulous article on benchmarking JIT optimised VMs: performance can vary massively, warmups can be unpredictable, optimisation sometimes hurts perf and you may not even reach a steady state!

Git Thermite is a diff visualisation tool in Pharo: https://github.com/ronsaldo/pharo-git-thermite Looking at the videos, you can see how the visualisations are totally integrated with browsing the modified classes! Very Smalltalk-y.

Interesting short article by Alan Kay arguing that the problem with the web is that users can't modify the pages they interact with: https://www.squeakland.org/resources/articles/article.jsp?id=1001

Learning about OCaml's OO features today. It rather reminds me of Go: you don't need to do up-front design of what common methods your objects have. Its type is just its methods (structural typing AIUI). You don't even need to define classes at all! Just return an object.