miniblog.

HTTP/3, and how it tackles the limitations of today's TCP:

I'm beginning to wonder whether computer form factors are a product of the environment. Suppose I went back in time 20 or 30 years, and told manufacturers that powerful handheld devices with touchscreens would be popular. Would they be able to do anything with that information?

Moving Android towards unpatched, mainline Linux kernels:

Shower thought: plurals are basically Hungarian notation, but with a suffix rather than a prefix.

My email load is sufficiently low that I'm willing to budget one response per person to emails from strangers. I don't understand how people with high profiles (e.g. running major OSS projects) manage.

On representing game worlds in Rust using Entity-Component-System, modelling state, and avoiding self-borrowing:

Bill Gates likes the Silicon Valley show, and finds it an often accurate caricature!

We still think of apps and websites separately. I've only ever added one website to my home screen. I'm not if this is due to limited support, or just users not thinking about websites as 'installable'.

Another kernel written in Rust! https://github.com/hermitcore/libhermit-rs Rust tooling/docs must be making operating system development more accessible, as there is an impressive number of these projects.

Measuring the effectiveness of debug info in gcc and clang by comparing how often a variable is known to be defined vs how often you can access it:

Sometimes metaprogramming (macros etc) is a useful technique for refactoring, simply because you can try and then discard different designs: https://blog.metaobject.com/2018/11/refactoring-towards-language.html (I've certainly written then thrown away macros when writing Lisp!)

The Web Design Museum is a fascinating set of screenshots of early websites:

The esoteric language BF was designed to be a language where you could write a very small compiler. Self-hosting BF is significantly harder though. If we designed languages to minimise total LOC for a project plus its compiler, what would end up with?

When your blog is already hosted by GitHub, you can even have your comment backend on GitHub too! https://utteranc.es/ (I've decided to trial it on my blog: https://www.wilfred.me.uk/)

Persisting editor and mental state across debugging sessions is really hard. It's often easier to have a single, longer debugging session.