I feel uneasy about design patterns.
On the one hand, my university class on design patterns revived my interest in programming.
On the other hand, I find most patterns in the Gang of Four book to be irrelevant to my daily work;
they solve problems that a choice of programming language or paradigm creates.

My litmus test of a good design pattern is its cross-disciplinary applicability.
I’m more likely to accept an idea that pops up in fields beyond software engineering.
And the most convincing patterns are the ones that help me in everyday life.

This article describes a universal pattern that billions of people rely on daily, but software engineers rarely discuss—the plan-execute pattern.

I have a lot of thoughts about the design of compiler intermediate representations (IRs). In this post I’m going to try and communicate some of those ideas and why I think they are important.

The share_target manifest member allows installed Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) to be registered as a share target in the system's share dialog.

When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety.
And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications.
Memory safety is important but not sufficient for overall r…

A well-equipped ASCII diagram builders freely available on the internet.
It stresses portability, simplicity, and immediateness.

I recently wrote about Async Pool, one of my favorite JavaScript / TypeScript helpers, and today I want to share an even simpler yet extremely useful utility

This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed code.

A fun, hands-on guide to writing your own compiler for a real-world programming language.

The expression problem describes how most types can easily be extended with new ways to produce the type or new ways to consume the type, but not both. When abstract syntax trees are defined as an algebraic data type, for example, they can easily be extended with new consumers, such as print or eval, but adding a new constructor requires the modification of all existing pattern matches. The expression problem is one way to elucidate the difference between functional or data-oriented programs (easily extendable by new consumers) and object-oriented programs (easily extendable by new producers). This difference between programs which are extensible by new producers or new consumers also exists for dependently typed programming, but with one core difference: Dependently-typed programming almost exclusively follows the functional programming model and not the object-oriented model, which leaves an interesting space in the programming language landscape unexplored. In this paper, we explore the field of dependently-typed object-oriented programming by deriving it from first principles using the principle of duality. That is, we do not extend an existing object-oriented formalism with dependent types in an ad-hoc fashion, but instead start from a familiar data-oriented language and derive its dual fragment by the systematic use of defunctionalization and refunctionalization. Our central contribution is a dependently typed calculus which contains two dual language fragments. We provide type- and semantics-preserving transformations between these two language fragments: defunctionalization and refunctionalization. We have implemented this language and these transformations and use this implementation to explain the various ways in which constructions in dependently typed programming can be explained as special instances of the phenomenon of duality.

I make mostly IRC software in C. I like OpenBSD but also the GPL. I just want to read books and try to learn to be kinder. When I can I'd like to talk to strangers and experience more magic.

This article presents the program earlyoom to prevent a Linux system to lock up in low memory situations.

I've been running NetBSD on a RockPro64 since NetBSD 10-BETA, and I'm still happy with it now with NetBSD 10-RELEASE. I'm always looking for hardware to hack NetBSD though, and I recently watched a FOSDEM 2024 video: NetBSD 10: Thirty years, still going strong!. The Pinebook Pro laptop was mentioned at one point, which has the same RockChip SoC as the RockPro64. That reminded me I'd been wanting to give this inexpensive ARM 64 laptop a try.