Status update, July 2021 July 15, 2021 on Drew DeVault's blog

Hallo uit Nederland! I’m writing to you from a temporary workstation in Amsterdam, pending the installation of a better one that I’ll put together after I visit a furniture store today. I’ve had to slow a few things down somewhat while I prepare for this move, and I’ll continue to be slower for some time following it, but things are moving along regardless.

One point of note is that the maintainer for aerc, Reto Brunner, has stepped down from his role. I’m looking for someone new to fill his shoes; please let me know if you are interested.

As far as the language project is concerned, there has been some significant progress. We’ve broken ground on the codegen rewrite, and it’s looking much better than its predecessor. I expect progress on this front to be fairly quick. In the meanwhile, a new contributor has come onboard to help with floating-point math operations, and I merged their first patch this morning — adding math::abs, math::copysign, etc. Another contributor has been working in a similar space, and sent in an f32-to-string function last week. I implemented DNS resolution and a “dial” function as well, which you can read about in my previous post about a finger client.

I also started writing some POSIX utilities in the new language for fun:

use fmt;
use fs;
use getopt;
use io;
use main;
use os;

export fn utilmain() (io::error | fs::error | void) = {
	const cmd = getopt::parse(os::args);
	defer getopt::finish(&cmd);

	if (len(cmd.args) == 0) {
		io::copy(os::stdout, os::stdin)?;
		return;
	};

	for (let i = 0z; i < len(cmd.args); i += 1z) {
		const file = match (os::open(cmd.args[i])) {
			err: fs::error => fmt::fatal("Error opening '{}': {}",
				cmd.args[i], fs::strerror(err)),
			file: *io::stream => file,
		};
		defer io::close(file);
		io::copy(os::stdout, file)?;
	};
};

We’re still looking for someone to contribute in cryptography, and in date/time support — please let me know if you want to help.

In SourceHut news, I have mostly been focused on writing the GraphQL API for lists.sr.ht. I have made substantial progress, and I had hoped to ship the first version before publishing today’s status updates, but I was delayed due to concerns with the move abroad. I hope to also have sr.ht available for Alpine 3.14 in the near future.

Articles from blogs I read Generated by openring

What's cooking on SourceHut? Q2 2025

Hello everyone! We’re back with another quarterly update for you on how things are going at SourceHut. It’s been a busy few months, and we’re happy to share what we’re working on with you all. Drew’s updates As readers of my personal blog might have noticed w…

via Blogs on Sourcehut May 29, 2025

My perfect music synchronization solution

I'm buying DRM free music for a long time, and I synchronized those music files across my devices using Syncthing. But my library weight growth, now weighting 60G… Some of my devices can't afford this! I had to find an alternative. Years ago I swit…

via Willow's feed May 23, 2025

The Future of Customer Support is Lies, I Guess

Update, 2025-05-22: TrueNAS was kind enough to reach out and let me know that their support process does not normally incorporate LLMs. They’re talking about what happened internally, and intend to prevent it from happening again through improved document…

via Aphyr: Posts May 21, 2025