miniblog.

I write a lot of markdown, so I'm comfortable with the format, but *asterisks* for *italics* still seems strange to me. I mentally read it as bold, and some mailing list web frontends to the same thing.

@dcreemer@octodon.social I set it up once and I've never needed to fiddle again: it's worked really well. I also use Tusky on my phone to read toots and respond to folks. I don't want my Mastodon usage to be write only.

Applying different profile guided optimisation techniques to the rust compiler:

Efficiently sandboxing Firefox by compiling potentially vulnerable libraries to wasm, and then compiling wasm to C!

On the remarkable inertia of database and programming language choices early in the life of a company:

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:

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:

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:

The tradeoffs of type system design, and thinking about a gradual type checker for Elixir:

Eglot, an LSP client for Emacs, is now a built-in package!

Exploring the design space and tradeoffs of programming language syntax, and syntactic sugar vs syntactic salt: