Post AMHGBApm5ucs5mtLhQ by technomancy@icosahedron.website
(DIR) More posts by technomancy@icosahedron.website
(DIR) Post #AMHGBApm5ucs5mtLhQ by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-06T23:01:24Z
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@cwebber "Compilation By Program Transformation" is such a weird title... it's like "Walking by Moving Legs"
(DIR) Post #AMHGBBKyDvZzeXUGK8 by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-07T03:35:13Z
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@cwebber but ohhhh Christine... this post is giving me the feels.I really want to believe. I want to live in this dream world we've all been envisioning where we can finally live free from the curse of the Original Sin of using C.but that dream feels like a black hole that just sucks in all the work you can possibly give it without a credible promise on the other side of something that can work for everyone.for every person who hacks on an ideal application, you have someone who's going even further to develop their own ideal language, and someone who goes further than that to develop an ideal (done right this time!) VM, and beyond that someone with their ideal OS that finally learns from the mistakes of the past, who of course is surpassed by someone with their amazing, pure, ideal instruction set and CPU architecture which will finally set us free (once we solve the pesky problem of fabrication).
(DIR) Post #AMHGBBherZjAmu6Nge by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-07T03:41:41Z
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@cwebber and even with all this that everyone has done, can you really credibly tell me that this "ideal" world is for everyone? have we found a way to render Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, and Russian without harfbuzz? have we found a way to implement TLS 1.3 in sectorlisp? are we prepared to reimplement the entire universe of browser-based applications in this from-the-ground-up done-right-this-time world?meanwhile we're having this conversation on a network which runs on web browsers and unix and mountains of unspeakably awful, insecure, hacked-to-bits C code but it's this incredible place where people can actually own their conversations and live their lives without corporate pressures breathing down their neck every second.it feels so indulgent and elitist to spend time on the former when the latter is here today and is actually demonstrably changing lives, I guess?but I'm as guilty as any, some wanker who builds compilers recreationally. I dunno. wish I could do more.
(DIR) Post #AMHGBCCqzagILehIJM by mala@mastodon.social
2022-08-07T06:25:29Z
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@technomancy @cwebber I really *really* sympathise with this fear, and feel that it's the hard work that needs to be done. is it impossible? maybe, and these foundations are certainly colossi of code and absorbed knowledge and practice, but they are not intractable or irrepeatable -- I believe we do not rebuild them largely because of the sunk costs, not because it is impossible.The question is: how to make this challenge tractable? A few ideas:
(DIR) Post #AMHGBCaxXxxnYPyXsu by mala@mastodon.social
2022-08-07T06:36:19Z
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@technomancy @cwebber * in the before times the majorit of the established world was proprietary, so you couldn't use automated systems to analyse and incrementally incorporate older systems. Now harfbuzz, chrome etc default to open* there is evidence that re-implementation is getting easier: we've gone from Linux being a multi-year bootstrap to hobby OSes emerging a regular basis, including web platform support e.g https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity
(DIR) Post #AMHGBD3fpCvqzTPTdo by Suiseiseki@freesoftwareextremist.com
2022-08-07T07:20:20.213270Z
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@mala >Now harfbuzz, chrome etc default to openChrome is proprietary software, what are you on about?There's chromium, but some parts of the source have unclear licensing, plus such it way too huge for a single person to feasibly read the source.>there is evidence that re-implementation is getting easierYes, thanks to the good work on GNU, which has done everything required, for other software to bootstrap off on.
(DIR) Post #AMHGBGoZrHEWdoNTfM by mala@mastodon.social
2022-08-07T06:41:13Z
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@technomancy @cwebber * similiarly, the toolkit around emulation or building harnesses has improved: VMs/sandboxes are not only commonly used but code has adapted to living in these spaces -- a program that doesn't run in docker or virtualized hardware isn't much use thse days
(DIR) Post #AMHGBIOlyBmRYMJtiq by mala@mastodon.social
2022-08-07T06:45:40Z
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@technomancy @cwebber * there's increasing commonality between well-funded commercial research goals and the needs of alternative platform makers: e.g. the porting of chrome to Fuchsia, Google's cap-based OS, Microsoft and ARM's funding of OS ports and toolkit support for CHERI https://msrc-blog.microsoft.com/2022/01/20/an_armful_of_cheris/
(DIR) Post #AMHGBJyG7jlCQhvkfo by mala@mastodon.social
2022-08-07T06:49:07Z
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@technomancy @cwebber * there are also some hardware trends that are promising -- on one hand we now have a handful of promising open hardware platforms (and no more than a handful!) which gives some hope to having a limited support matrix. on the other, the chip building stack is opening up, promising some ability to bend the hardware to the needs of our goals instead of struggling the other way
(DIR) Post #AMHGBLUYT9Bj9A33eS by mala@mastodon.social
2022-08-07T06:53:38Z
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@technomancy @cwebber I think the biggest social challenge, as you note, is how hard it is to get everyone to focus on one "perfect" platform rather than everyone pursuing their own utopian dream setup. This certainly divides resources and attention. It's the classic problem of decentralized development! But that just means we must pursue the hard work of connecting and co-operating, just as the builders of open systems before us did
(DIR) Post #AMIdnLZ18rqGThBWaG by veer66@mstdn.io
2022-08-07T23:19:41Z
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@technomancy I suddenly think of Smalltalk. I still cannot get Pharo to display Thai text. 🙀 @cwebber
(DIR) Post #AMIib1ALeeLDVjaQT2 by veer66@mstdn.io
2022-08-08T00:13:29Z
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@mala Since Harfbuzz requires basic text processing, since 2002, I have tried to rewrite libicu in Objective C because I want the word breaker to be in a form that is convenient to improve. Now I focus on the word breaker only https://github.com/veer66/wordcut-engine. Still, I speak Thai and Lao. I know about 20 words in Khmer. I have no idea how to break Myanmar text. 1/2 @technomancy @cwebber
(DIR) Post #AMIie7f9xJ4QWtTk9I by veer66@mstdn.io
2022-08-08T00:14:03Z
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@mala Moreover, I use regular expressions and word lists for breaking text. When I tried to implement the word breaker in Common Lisp, I couldn't find any regular expression engine nearly as efficient as the one by Andrew Gallant in Rust. 2/2 @technomancy @cwebber
(DIR) Post #AMKVAhmyAJh8nSh5fs by mala@mastodon.social
2022-08-08T20:52:27Z
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@veer66 @technomancy @cwebber is this because the wordbreaker in libicu/harfbuzz is deficient, or are you trying to replicate its functionality to make it easier to improve further by external developers?
(DIR) Post #AMKiOFZj9shgkhHzVY by veer66@mstdn.io
2022-08-08T23:20:36Z
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@mala libicu have already had a word breaker for decades. So I made another word breaker that is easier to improve even by a linguist.@technomancy @cwebber
(DIR) Post #AMKiT14QVxXnDKvAoa by veer66@mstdn.io
2022-08-08T23:21:28Z
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@mala libicu have already had a word breaker for decades. So I made another word breaker easier to improve even by a linguist.@technomancy @cwebber
(DIR) Post #AML6uvVjB0DcymX4tc by veer66@mstdn.io
2022-08-09T03:55:25Z
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@mala I also made one for Common Lisp; https://github.com/veer66/cl-wordcut. It was slow. 😅 So I made another implementation by porting from the Python version, https://git.sr.ht/~veer66/wordcut-bench/tree/main/item/wordcut.lisp.I think I can make the Lisp version almost as fast as the Rust version. Still, it will take time, which I don't have much.@technomancy @cwebber
(DIR) Post #AMN83qMSBF4hsuvjpw by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-07T16:34:23Z
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@mala @cwebber yes and no. because when I see things like SerenityOS it actually makes me want to do a lispy OS even less! here I'm looking at the one alternate OS that has a (slim) chance of succeeding. I can either switch to it (and give up on ever escaping from C) or compete with it divide efforts even worse than before.(the argument that docker makes it easier doesn't count for much to me when docker is symptomatic of all the problems I want to avoid.)but in the end as you've noted, it's the ancient fated Lisp Curse which is the greatest threat.
(DIR) Post #AMN83qo6WRC1Gfrow4 by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-07T16:37:50Z
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@mala @cwebber it's particularly telling that generations of lispers have tried and failed at uprooting Emacs from its C. Emacs, the most beloved-by-lispers program ever written, has a dozen half-finished attempts to "do it right this time" and liberate it from its humble and yucky origin point. if we can't even get something like that off the ground, how can we talk about entire operating systems or chipsets?
(DIR) Post #AMNEWbMDdtXXTSutbE by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-07T17:05:12Z
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@cwebber @mala yeah I guess I should be totally extra clear here that this whole time I'm describing my own emotional journey and emphatically NOT telling other people what they should be doing with their time!
(DIR) Post #AMNEWboDxlwQsK1GFc by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-07T17:10:20Z
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@cwebber @mala but it's also about me personally wondering if there's some way to spend my own efforts more on things that could have end-user impact rather than toys for nerds.(as much I can say it's a great and necessary thing that gotosocial is taking over the niche that pleroma originally occupied, trading elixir for golang means it's nearly impossible for me to summon up any enthusiasm to hack on its codebase directly.)
(DIR) Post #AMNEWcCgUpVW6BSnNQ by akkartik@merveilles.town
2022-08-10T04:21:05Z
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@technomancy @cwebber @mala Since we're baring our souls and talking personal emotional journeys here..Having spent a good chunk of my life trying to bootstrap a new language stack and OS from scratch[1] and gotten a visceral education in all the ways that's difficult and, worse, ill-posed[2], I now have a new answer to the most impactful thing I can work on:(cont'd)[1] https://github.com/akkartik/mu[2] https://lobste.rs/s/h4lnkn/what_are_you_doing_this_week#c_juxc6y
(DIR) Post #AMNEWcm8N1rbs836dE by akkartik@merveilles.town
2022-08-10T04:22:12Z
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A more decentralized approach to software governance.This connects up with capitalism, bear with me.Projects evolve over time, especially growing monotonically more complex. Again and again I see projects slow with age. Is a clean new project really an advance? Maybe it's just younger? Conversely, I don't use Emacs, but I think it's the healthiest software project in the world today. Extremely old, continuously in development for decades, still sporting incredibly vibrant releases.
(DIR) Post #AMNEWdDmiDyvFszBjM by akkartik@merveilles.town
2022-08-10T04:22:36Z
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If good platforms might be mirages over time, and bad platforms can participate in good projects, what's the pattern here? My best guess: incentives. Emacs may have survived all these years partly because no business makes money from it and so has an incentive to capture its governance.In this worldview the problem with C is not its safety issues. It's that compiler projects are captured by companies to interpret UB more and more aggressively.
(DIR) Post #AMNEWdmAeNUGyX4eKO by akkartik@merveilles.town
2022-08-10T04:23:05Z
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If I'm right, what will move the needle is not a better point-in-time design but somehow making projects capture resistant. And I think the best way to do this lies in the direction of 10x/100x more forks. It will put each fork closer to the sub-communities that use it. Communities of users will be closer in size to the projects they depend on, no more fan out/blast radius of 1M-100M users.
(DIR) Post #AMNEWeGIqLaeTzAiIK by akkartik@merveilles.town
2022-08-10T04:23:37Z
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When producers and consumers are more similar in size, you get greater accountability. Accountability to _people_ rather than companies with revenue.Emacs creates incredible value in the world, but it contributes zero to GDP. This is an indictment of GDP. We need better measures.Yes, the world is burning. Yes, we need to do things about it. But doing requires organization. Healthier modes of organization are hugely valuable.Asimov reference: fixing incentives is the Second Foundation.eof
(DIR) Post #AMOoNfI3RSi4Zbxzvc by loke@functional.cafe
2022-08-10T16:15:04Z
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@cwebber @technomancy @mala Yes, but what's the benefit? Scheme is too different from Elisp to be a reasonable replacement. You really don't want a language with two distinct and incompatible strings. And that's just one of the issues.
(DIR) Post #AMOoNff63n8pj4kOqO by technomancy@icosahedron.website
2022-08-10T16:17:52Z
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@loke @cwebber @mala well, I didn't say it was a good idea necessarily; just that there are people who are trying. =)"that emacs clone died" as an argument is kind of ... well, as far as I know *every* emacs clone is dead, or in the process of dying. so it doesn't tell you much about the differences between them.
(DIR) Post #AMOoNg5KUG7p2R1LjU by loke@functional.cafe
2022-08-10T16:20:03Z
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@technomancy @cwebber @mala remacs wasn't an emacs clone though. It was the poster child for when "rewrite it in rust" is ill advised.Personally, I don't really have a horse in this game. I'll use GNU Emacs until a better alternative exists, and I frankly don't care what language the core is written in. I wouldn't spend time on rewriting it, and rather work on something better. Climacs was a good first and second attempt. Perhaps the third will be worth working on. 🙂
(DIR) Post #AMOp8OlegqjawL62ls by veer66@mstdn.io
2022-08-10T22:55:01Z
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@loke Lem isn't an Emacs clone. Still, it looks interesting to me.https://github.com/lem-project/lem@technomancy @cwebber @mala