miniblog

Wilfred Hughes

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.

Oct 29, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

Experience report on writing the same small web app in C#, Deno, Go, Elixir, Rust and Scala: https://github.com/losvedir/transit-lang-cmp

Oct 27, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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)

Oct 26, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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/

Oct 25, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

RISC features for ISAs, and which design choices have stood the test of time: https://wiki.alopex.li/RiscIn2022

Oct 25, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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

Oct 23, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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/

Oct 23, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

Eglot, an LSP client for Emacs, is now a built-in package! https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2022-10/msg01609.html

Oct 22, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

Exploring the design space and tradeoffs of programming language syntax, and syntactic sugar vs syntactic salt: https://cs.lmu.edu/~ray/notes/syntaxdesign/

Oct 22, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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

Oct 22, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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

Oct 21, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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.

Oct 19, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

Some fun examples of things you can do with type inference in Rust, from a GCC-rust contributor.

Oct 16, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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

Oct 15, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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.

Oct 14, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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

Oct 13, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

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.

Oct 12, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

Superb discussion of Go semantics for `for` loop variables, the challenges of breaking changes, and the tradeoffs of static analysis: https://github.com/golang/go/discussions/56010

Oct 11, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

@friend It seems like people find Zig comptime easier to reason about, hence the interest in introducing it to other languages. That seems worth something. I still prefer Lisp/Clojure style macros over safer Scheme/Rust macros. Lisp macro implementations are closer to typical code.

Oct 11, 2022

Wilfred Hughes

@friend sqlite is a great example! I used to use a Proper Database Server (typically postgres) for my hobby projects, but I'm so glad I switched. Initial deployment is way easier and my data is always pretty small.

Oct 11, 2022