Making system programming fun again

 Hi folks,

The AsiaBSDCon is about to start as I write, the main talk which interests me the most is about NGINX Unit, some seem to be updated versions of previous talks but should be great regardless. Following that, FreeBSD 13.2 is around the corner, starting this week !.

Aside from my usual contributions, I recently stumbled across the Zig programming language which I heard of before already but never really tried. Then after couple of days of experimentation, I was pleasantly surprised how easy is to interact with C, you just need to import and the symbols are available to you ; Zig being also a C/C++ compiler you can build a final binary with those 2/3 languages. I also appreciated the absence of preprocessor, the comptime concept (e.g. a if statement can also evaluate a compile time expression) ; overall Andrew Kelley's optimism and dedication is infectious I find. Seems Zig is at a place where Rust was a decade or so ago, not stable yet but is above an interesting threshold with this 0.10.x version. Those two languages represent some very good candidates as the "next" C (Yes I know there is others like Nim, Odin...). Note that C/C++ are not inherently bad languages, not at all ... they are decades ago old which is very different, it is always good to remember the context ...

Also, I decided recently to give a new go at the redox operating system (which is written in Rust), doing mostly TODOs and my own ideas, most of them are already merged.