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Status update, October 2021

On this dreary morning here in Amsterdam, I’ve made my cup of coffee and snuggled my cat, and so I’m pleased to share some FOSS news with you. Some cool news today! We’re preparing for a new core product launch at sr.ht, cool updates for our secret programming language, plus news for visurf.

Simon Ser has been hard at work on expanding his soju and gamja projects for the purpose of creating a new core sourcehut product: chat.sr.ht. We’re rolling this out in a private beta at first, to seek a fuller understanding of the system’s performance characteristics, to make sure everything is well-tested and reliable, and to make plans for scaling, maintenance, and general availability. In short, chat.sr.ht is a hosted IRC bouncer which is being made available to all paid sr.ht users, and a kind of webchat gateway which will be offered to unpaid and anonymous users. I’m pretty excited about it, and looking forward to posting a more detailed announcement in a couple of weeks. In other sourcehut news, work on GraphQL continues, with paste.sr.ht landing and todo.sr.ht’s writable API in progress.

Our programming langauge project grew some interesting features this month as well, the most notable of which is probably reflection. I wrote an earlier blog post which goes over this in some detail. There’s also ongoing work to develop the standard library’s time and date support, riscv64 support is essentially done, and we’ve overhauled the grammar for switch and match statements to reduce a level of indentation for typical code. In the coming weeks, I hope to see date/time support and reflection fleshed out much more, and to see some more development on the self-hosted compiler.

Earlier: How reflection works in ****

Work has also continued apace on visurf, which is a project I would love to have your help with — drop me a note on #netsurf on libera.chat if you’re interested. Since we last spoke, visurf has gained support for readline-esque keybindings on the exline, a “follow” mode for keyboard navigation, Wayland clipboard support, and a few other features besides. Please help! This project will need a lot of work to complete, and much of that work is very accessible to programmers of any skill level.

Also on the subject of Netsurf and Netsurf-adjacent work, I broke ground on antiweb this month. The goal of this project is to provide a conservative CSS toolkit which allows you to build web interfaces which are compatible with marginalized browsers like Netsurf and Lynx. I should be able to migrate my blog to this framework in the foreseeable future, and ultimately the sourcehut frontend will be overhauled with this framework.

And a collection of minor updates:

I have been working on Alpine Linux for RISC-V again, and have upstreamed the necessary patches to get u-Boot to bootstrap UEFI into grub for a reasonably sane boot experience. Next up will be getting this installed onto the onboard SPI flash so that it works more like a native firmware.
I have tagged versions 1.0 of gmnisrv and gmni.
Adnan Maolood has been hard at work on godocs.io and we should soon expect a 1.0 of our gddo fork as well, which should make it more or less plug-and-play to get a working godocs instance on localhost from your local Go module cache.

That’s all for today! Take care, and thank you as always for your continued support. I’ll see you next month!

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“Status update, October 2021” was published on October 15, 2021.

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