As shortform video grows in popularity, will we start seeing it in docs?
I can imagine a docs page that starts with a 30-60 second video as being popular for some users.
miniblog.
What defines the *feel* of a programming language?
I've heard JS described as "composing lego blocks" due to npm, and Common Lisp with Sly feels like a place you explore (e.g. docs from the REPL).
All PLs have tools though. Which ones set the vibe?
Today I read the term "negative bus factor" to describe the situation where multiple libraries have the same single maintainer.
Perhaps people measure bus factor logarithmically?
A function with three arguments of the same type is way easier to screw up than a function with ten arguments of different types. It's weird.
I've released difftastic 0.41 with a ton of quality of life improvements!
* Better highlighting of words in comments and fallback textual mode
* Better support of tabs (handy for Makefiles)
* Support for nested syntax in HTML files (courtesy of Sesse)
https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.41.0
Today I learnt that Cell<T> has the size of a pointer (i.e. probably 64 bits) in Rust, regardless of the size of T.
It's a common pattern for making struct fields mutable, but the T isn't actually stored inside the struct.
A survey of parser generator usage in major language implementationss: https://notes.eatonphil.com/parser-generators-vs-handwritten-parsers-survey-2021.html
Most have a handwritten parser. GCC and Go moved from generated to handwritten. SQLite and Python <3.10 built their own parser generators!
The next version of difftastic will support parsing CSS and JS syntax inside HTML! This makes a huge difference to HTML files.
This support for tree-sitter sub-parsers was contributed by Sesse :)
Writing a programming language? Challenge the design status quo: https://joshondesign.com/2012/04/09/open-letter-language-designers
Zig has moved to a compiler bootstrap approach that uses webassembly: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/
They check in the wasm artifact and provide their own wasm compiler. wasm is the most portable backend supported by LLVM.
OCaml does something similar! It includes a minimal VM.
Reading the beta 4 release notes for Haiku R1, it's striking how much work it is to support modern WiFi protocols: https://www.haiku-os.org/get-haiku/r1beta4/release-notes/
Previously, 802.11ac was only supported on Linux and OpenBSD! (Ignoring proprietary operating systems)
Is there any way to filter out toots that aren't in languages you understand?
I see translation offered on some toots, so presumably there's at least some language detection.
Wow, Android is throwing significant weight behind RISC-V: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/01/google-announces-official-android-support-for-risc-v/
Diffing comments is surprisingly hard. In difftastic, I'm colouring the whole changed comment, but also underlining the changed words.
This works OK, but punctuation is harder to read (see second image) and sometimes there's code in comments (see third image).
Difftastic now handles tab characters precisely! This sounds like a small thing, but it's crucial when parsing Makefile syntax.
Makefiles look way better now.
(Technically tabs are also syntactically significant inside string literals, and that case is fixed too.)
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