(Ir)regular (self-)expression #2

Published on Jul 04, 2022

It’s half past eight in the evening as I’m writing this. It’s not as hot as it usually is at noon, so I can do things without my flesh melting. However, the second month of the summer has barely started, so we’ll see how bearable the weather will be in a week or two.

Hello again! Irregular self-expressions are sure living up to their name, but here’s the second one nonetheless.

nsl

nsl, nested structures language, is something I’ve been apparently working for 8 months already; the first time I mentioned it on Fedi was last November! As it turns out, coming up with a design that would satisfy me is a bit more difficult than I originally thought. During those 8 months, nsl syntax has been changing again and again; in fact, the example in the previous post isn’t valid anymore, as I’ve decided against adding single-quoted strings and JSON-like vectors, though I’m still not so sure about the former.

As for libnsl: I’ve finished it! And then realized it was a textbook example of overengineering, so I made another nsl implementation, this time without handrolled hashmaps and necessarily buffered I/O… What’s left is some API enhancements, but those really shouldn’t take too much time. They shouldn’t, right?

Oh, and tests, of course. This part should be easy, as I already know what to test for, and the amount of code is much lower than it was before.

With that being said, I would be happy to finally release everything next week, or this month, at least. After all, this project shouldn’t have taken so long anyway, considering how simple it is.

wlroots

For the past 2-3 months, I’ve been mostly fixing some bugs here and there; besides introducing wlr_damage_ring as a more straightforward replacement wlr_output_damage, there wasn’t much contribution in terms of code from me specifically, but everyone else sure wasn’t wasting time. One thing that I really want to point out is Alexander Orzechowski’s work on wlr_scene. While still having some rough edges, it has been rapidly improving thanks to his MRs, and there are still more to merge!

Seeing wlroots improve day by day reminds me how I wanted to write a Wayland compositor, being dissatisfied with everything the world had to offer; wlroots seemed like the best choice for such a task, but I had some problems with it, and so I started writing patches. A year later, the compositor development is long abandoned, and I am a core wlroots contributor, working with great people on a great project.

…I guess you call it a success?

Meatspace

Nothing particularly interesting has happened in the human realm. I’ve passed all of my finals and finished the first year of university, and for some reason, my relatives are much happier about that than I am.

Frankly, writing this really makes me realize how much time I waste in front of my computer. On the other hand, it’s not like my life was that different while the laptop was in a repair centre for 20 days; I was simply wasting time by looking at a smaller screen, ugh.

Some good news is that I’ve recently picked up Japanese (because of course it’s Japanese) again. Hopefully this time I’ll stick to it for a bit longer than my previous attempts to learn this language.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and have a nice day!