wilfredh

wilfredh, 30 days ago to random

I've release difftastic 0.58:

• Updated C, C++, CMake, CSS, Elm, Go, Lua and Python parsers
• Better diffs when files have parse errors
• Polish: CRLF handling, obscure terminal detection, and a man page!

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.58.0

wilfredh, 1 month ago to random

It's weird how even pure languages tend to treat the Unix execution model as ambient state.

Are there any PLs that define a main function like this?

fn main(args, stdin, stdout, env) -> exit code

wilfredh, 1 month ago to random

I think software maintainers can perceive their projects as way more buggy than they actually are.

You spend more time looking at the bug tracker, which is (hopefully!) not representative of typical usage.

krinkle, 2 months ago to random

deleted_by_author

wilfredh, 2 months ago to random

tap> is an elegant Clojure debugging feature: it passes the argument to any functions registered with add-tap.

You might set up a custom printer for your data type, or save values for later examination, and you can easily disable the tap too.

https://dev.to/hlship/debugging-clojure-at-the-repl-using-tap-2pm5

wilfredh, 2 months ago to random

I've released difftastic 0.57! In this release:

• A bunch of improvements around detection and display of binary files.
• Fixed some diffing issues with (ironically) text files.
• Better diff results for Scheme.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.57.0

wilfredh, 2 months ago to random

The Bitter Lesson: how implementing generic search and scaling compute outperforms custom logic in many situations: http://www.incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html

wilfredh, 3 months ago to random

I've been reading about the object-capability model as seen in the E programming language.

It reminds me of dependency injection, but used pervasively. Rather than calling static methods, you pass in object arguments and call methods in them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-capability_model

wilfredh, 3 months ago to random

I'm flattered that SemanticDiff has a blog post comparing it with difftastic! https://semanticdiff.com/blog/semanticdiff-vs-difftastic/

It's a pretty even-handed post, and it touches on some of the different design decisions. For example, SemanticDiff considers 0xA and 10 to be the same when diffing.

wilfredh, 3 months ago to random

Fun example of a bunch of YAML gotchas all in a single file: https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

wilfredh, 3 months ago to random

I've been using a 'golden tests' library for testing my parser, and it's just delightful. Rather than writing a verbose assertion about the resulting AST, I can just re-run my tests until the output looks good!

I'm using https://github.com/jfecher/golden-tests currently, which can automatically update the output in the file.

Example commit: https://github.com/Wilfred/garden/commit/cea75238ff9de0b74caf20c64096c2fa46cdc30a

wilfredh, 4 months ago to random

I'm experimenting with a patch-style display format for difftastic.

What do you think? Do the colours work? What about the last example, where there's only whitespace changes and the syntactic diff has nothing to highlight?

wilfredh, 4 months ago to random

Do you think values and types should be in separate namespaces? Why/why not?

wilfredh, 4 months ago to random

Difftastic 0.55 is out! In this release:

• Support for VHDL and Objective-C
• Improved support for XML
• The usual smattering of bugfixes :)

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.55.0

Objective-C screenshot

wilfredh, 4 months ago to random

Do any package managers use bittorrent? I associate bittorrent with distributing large files, but it seems like it would really help scaling.

Most traffic to package managers is from CI systems, which could instead run their own local seeding nodes.

wilfredh, 4 months ago to random

Difftastic is written in Rust, so I was surprised to get a user report of a segfault.

After some investigation, it turns out that it's a segfault in git itself, which has existed since 2014! https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAFXAjY7XcL1APhLRXU8TO96z=f7957f2ieK56dHVsXUay55vpg@mail.gmail.com/T/#u

(Upstream has already kindly written a patch.)

wilfredh, 4 months ago to random

Which programming languages are the easiest/hardest to google?

Go (a common word) and Rust (also a computer game) can both be tricky. Yet I've not seen 'rubylang' used to help Ruby searches.

Perhaps a novel word (Kotlin) or a misspelling (Perl) is a better choice for new languages?

wilfredh, 4 months ago to random

A really nice explanation of lisp semantics, using userland code!

For example, you can define let in terms of let* and vice versa.

https://www.plover.com/~mjd/misc/hbaker-archive/MetaCircular.html

wilfredh, 5 months ago to random

I've released difftastic 0.54! In this release:

• Added support for the Salesforce Apex programming language
• Improvements to Clojure and Haskell parsing
• Difftastic will now show if file permissions changes

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.54.0

screenshot of difftastic and permission changes

wilfredh, 5 months ago to random

Difftastic now has its own homepage! I wanted to put together a set of screenshots that showed why you might like it.

https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

Feedback welcome :)

wilfredh, 6 months ago to random

A really fun (10 minute) talk on developing an LLVM backend for 6502, a chip with only three registers and a teeny tiny stack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lW3WHPtmKo

wilfredh, 7 months ago to random

Which languages do you consider to have the biggest/smallest standard libraries?

JS and Rust have a reputation for being pretty small. C has fewer data structures, but a bunch of system APIs.

Python feels more like a kitchen sink.

Where are other languages on this spectrum?

wilfredh, 7 months ago to random

Really thoughtful critique of the Language Server Protocol, what IDEs need to express, and the design decisions made.

https://matklad.github.io/2023/10/12/lsp-could-have-been-better.html

wilfredh, 7 months ago to random

JSON Lines is such a delight to use. It's particular nice as a CLI interop format.

You can use dumb, fast tools (e.g. grep to quickly filter large outputs) as well as structured tools (e.g. jq).

wilfredh, 8 months ago to random

I've released difftastic 0.52! In this release:

• Support for XML and JSONL
• Word-level diffing in text nodes (in HTML and XML)
• Improved syntax highlighting

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/releases/tag/0.52.0

difftastic with XML