This month marked my first time filing taxes in two countries, and I can assure you it is the worst. I am now a single-issue voter in the US: stop taxing expats! You can get some insight into the financials of SourceHut in the recently-published financial report. But let’s get right into the fun stuff: free software development news.
There was some slowdown from me this month thanks to all of the business and financial crap I had to put up with, but I was able to get some cool stuff done and many other contributors have been keeping things moving. I’ll start by introducing a new/old project: Himitsu.
Essentially, Himitsu is a secret storage system whose intended use-case is to provide features like password storage and SSH agent functionality. It draws much of its inspiration from Plan 9’s Factotum. You may have stumbled upon an early prototype on git.sr.ht which introduces the basic idea and included the start of an implementation in C. Ultimately I shelved this project for want of a better programming language to implement it with, and then I made a better programming language to implement it with. Over the past two weeks, I have implemented something similar to where the C codebase was left, in fewer than half the lines of code and much less than half the time. Here’s a little peek at what works now:
[12:18:31] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ ./himitsud
Please enter your passphrase to unlock the keyring:
[2022-04-15 12:18:56] himitsud running
^Z[1]+ Stopped ./himitsud
[12:18:57] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ bg
[1] ./himitsud
[12:18:58] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ nc -U ~/.local/state/himitsu/socket
add proto=imap host=example.org user=sir@cmpwn.com password!="Hello world!"
^C
[12:19:12] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ ls ~/.local/share/himitsu/
2849c1d5-61b3-4803-98cf-fc57fe5f69a6 index key
[12:19:14] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ cat ~/.local/share/himitsu/index
YNfVlkORDX1GmXIfL8vOiiTgBJKh47biFsUaKrqzfMP2xfD4B9/lqSl2Y9OtIpVcYzrNjBBZOxcO81vNQdgnvxQ+xaCKaVpQS4Dh6DyaY0/lpq6rfowTY5GwcI155KkmTI4z1ABOVkL4z4XDsQ2DEiqClcQE5/+CxsQ/U/u9DthLJRjrjw==
[12:19:19] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ fg
./himitsud
^C[2022-04-15 12:19:22] himitsud terminated
[12:19:22] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ ./himitsud
Please enter your passphrase to unlock the keyring:
Loaded key proto=imap host=example.org user=sir@cmpwn.com password!=2849c1d5-61b3-4803-98cf-fc57fe5f69a6
[2022-04-15 12:19:29] himitsud running
^C[2022-04-15 12:19:31] himitsud terminated
[12:19:33] taiga ~/s/himitsu $ find . -type f | xargs wc -l | tail -n1
895 total
This project is progressing quite fast and I hope to have it working for some basic use-cases soon. I’ll do a dedicated blog post explaining how it works and why it’s important later on, though it will remain mostly under wraps until the language is released.
Speaking of the language, there were a number of exciting developments this month. Two major standard library initiatives were merged: regex and datetime. The regex implementation is simple, small, and fast, targeting POSIX ERE as a reasonably sane conservative baseline regex dialect. The datetime implementation is quite interesting as well, and it provides a pretty comprehensive API which should address almost all use-cases for timekeeping in our language with a robust and easy-to-use API. As a bonus, and a little flex at how robust our design is, we’ve included support for Martian time. I’m very pleased with how both of these turned out.
use datetime;
use fmt;
use os;
use time::chrono;
export fn main() void = {
const now = datetime::in(chrono::MTC, datetime::now());
fmt::printf("Current Martian coordinated time: ")!;
datetime::format(os::stdout, datetime::STAMP, &now)!;
fmt::println()!;
};
Other recent improvements include support for signal handling, glob, aes-ni, and net::uri. Work has slowed down on cryptography — please get in touch if you’d like to help. Many readers will be happy to know that there are rumblings about possibly going public soon; after a couple more milestones we’ll be having a meeting to nail down the most urgent priorities before going public and then we’ll get this language into your hands to play with.
I also started a bittorrent daemon in this language, but it’s temporarily blocked until we sort out HTTP/TLS. So, moving right along: SourceHut news? Naturally I will leave most of it for the “what’s cooking” post, but I’ll offer you a little tease of what we’ve been working on: GraphQL. We landed support this month for GraphQL-native webhooks in todo.sr.ht, as well as some new improvements to the pages.sr.ht GQL API. hg.sr.ht is also now starting to see some polish put on its GraphQL support, and some research is underway on GraphQL Federation. Very soon we will be able to put a bow on this work.
That’s all for today! Thanks again for reading and for your ongoing support. I appreciate you!