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.

Feeling the power of the dragon again...

 Hi folks,

Hope you are all fine.

Couple of little updates ... For the FreeBSD fans, the 13.2 release is in within reach, about 1 month from now. Speaking of BSD, the next AsiaBSDCon in Japan would be the next major event, but there is the non less popular BSDCan as well not too long after. But if you dream to have a warm autumn for few days, there is the EuroBSDCon in Portugal 🌞

As for me, I spent more time in PHP, more code and doc reviews than my own code now ; some worthy new comers are pretty active 🙂 .. Nothing too new in the other hand, still doing a bit of rust here and there, couple of video games directly or indirectly related (e.g. SDL). Botan ... where I participate at modernising the codebase towards C++20 with new nice heuristics (e.g. std::span). Still, I did not lose my interest to memory allocators, my preferred remains now snmalloc, but isoalloc as a secure oriented one and with a smart yet readable api has its own qualities.

Next major release to wait is the 16th of LLVM with among many other things a better C++20 support via libc++ (it was lagging in many areas compared to g++), so hopefully you ll be overwhelmed by the famous dragon again 😉. 

It is to be expected sometime in March as well.

In the meantime, I wish you well.