[Discuss] seeking places for good discussion about GNU/Linux programming topics

[Bill Ricker]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2022, 15:04 Daniel M Gessel <daniel at syntheticblue.com>
wrote:

> I should have stated up front that my project is in the conceptual stage
> (I guess if I don't get anywhere that makes it vaporware?) My apologies
> for omitting the fact that it's a year or more away from being even
> potentially interesting to anyone.
>

If it might be interesting later,  it could be meta-interesting now.
If you want to bounce ideas off someone on a private channel ...



> GitHub seems like it's 50%+ about the community, which is something I'm
> looking for with the isolation of the pandemic and retirement.


Git in general is distributed development and thus community, whatever
hosting & workflow.  But of the free-ish options,  I'd agree that the less
purist FLOSS GH is possibly more community-ish than GL.
Though i could argue the GL project wikis are community too



> I was
> never able to follow fashion to the latest nightclub or other social
> venue, but it might be worth thinking that way: GitHub is the current
> hotspot, but be ready to head wherever the cool people go next.
>

Agree

Speaking of thin skins, twitter was too much for me at one time, and
> when I tried to rejoin my account ended up being locked and I gave up.
>

As with all (anti)Social Media, the key is curating one's feeds.


I'm not following what's really going on there though. I don't keep up
> with Elon Musk like some; my wife, who's from Cape Town, lumps him in
> with other rich South Africans so I have a reason to avoid his
> activities as a topic.
>

Quite.
Some of my favorite commentators reefer to him only as "that apartheid
emerald miner's brat" or some such,  which delights me.

The federated, purist-FLOSS Mastodon &c Fediverse lets one shop for a host
node that has privacy & conduct codes that match one's preferences or
needs, and still see a much of the global feed as one wants. (One could
also compartmentalize by having an account on each of several birds of a
father nodes.)
The web interface looks like a cheep TweetDeck clone, which will not please
everyone, but I here the iOS & Android apps are decent, I need to try that.
I'm @n1vux at mastodon.radio

(Dorsey's FLOSSish federated antiCorporate BLUESKY beta project sounds
similar,  I wonder if it's intentionally (in) compatible? )


Re compiling to C as IL:
 much of the world today compiles a VM in portable C99 or Rust and compiles
the higher app language to VM bytecodes.
(Possibly leveraging a standard VM & bytecode, e.g JVM.)

(Me, were I developing a new 4GL or whatever, I might compile it to Forth,
as Forth directly executes, as opposed to interprets.)

The latest hot new thing is https://wren.io/
but it sounds like it's more for an embedded script/extension language, to
add to an app, not to build apps.
(I'd still prefer to use Scheme-in-one-defun SioD again for an embedded
customization/extension language, but adding OO-ness to that was enough of
a pain, the uglier ^modern^ syntax of WREN might be tolerable.)

Were I starting a new project today, I'd  look at Rust for things that need
to be close to the hardware (but with better memory safety than any C), and
Dart/Flutter for portable applications that could run on a mobile device or
desktop. Golang is the other recent star,  favored by some.
But so much depends upon the domain one is targeting.