Notices by mcc (mcc@mastodon.social)

A thing I need you all to know before my plane takes off is that I look incredibly cute today

Walking through YVR trailing rainbows

Piece of advice: Never fly "Flair Airlines"; if you're using one of those deal seeker sites and that's the one that comes up, re-roll

Is this you

@whitequark @swetland really startling to find a situation where I'm like "this HTML page is so hard to read and navigate, I'll switch to the PDF ahh that's better"

@whitequark fuck's sake this is worse than LLVM IR

@whitequark by the way, the block example, Katelyn G was saying there's some sort of unusual limitation on which basic blocks may follow each other, is there anything that stops me from br'ing between blocks?

@whitequark well that's good to know because the next thing i was about to do was use a counter in a local to make the stack depth dynamic lol

OK so

I'm struggling with this week due to many issues that feel to me artificial. I don't like how this spec is written. I don't like a lot of the decisions

Buuut *sigh*

I guess I got the Good Idea out of the wasm spec I was hoping to find when I picked it. I was feeling like this S-expression form didn't "feel like" a LISP. And then I found this bit in the PDF spec. Using a syntax reordering trick to represent a Forth in LISP style. That's *saying this as if miserable* really smart actually

By the way if anyone has an easy way to point me to any of the following it would be much appreciated

- An example of the (block) syntax in textual wasm
- An "alignment" is described in "memarg" in the spec, but this shows up nowhere in the textual wasm examples I find. Is this implicit in the use of `i32.` instructions?
- Is there a way to query the current wasm stack depth?

@whitequark all right. if i'm trying to implement "putc" by pulling fd_write out of preview1 and telling it to print a single char from a single iov , am I to your knowledge missing a simpler method?

Wasm question

I was given https://hachyderm.io/@unlambda/114582671790895240 as some example code for printing to stdout from inside wasmtime/WASI

It calls a function named "fd_write" taken from "wasi_snapshot_preview1"

"wasi_snapshot_preview1" does not Google well and one link https://github.com/WebAssembly/WASI/blob/main/legacy/preview1/docs.md seems to suggest this is deprecated. How were the functions in wasi_snapshot_preview1 chosen? Is there a wasi_snapshot_preview2 or whatever?

@whitequark @mega if i am writing/generating code why would i use the stack for live variables instead of the locals, or vice versa?

This is a really good explanation of how a GPU works https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@aeva/114622234766861706

"JSON-LD" is short for "JavaScript Object Notation - LaserDisc" and refers simply to the standard JSON file format, stored on LaserDisc. JSON-LD was chosen for use in ActivityPub due to the many advantages of the LaserDisc format.

https://social.coop/@cwebber/114621322748408513

cc @cwebber

Been reading the docs and I have a LOT to say but

I've been using this lovely, friendly guide to figure out how to write WASM assembly

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Guides/Understanding_the_text_format

(The spec https://webassembly.github.io/spec/core/_download/WebAssembly.pdf is a little hard to work with)

And saw this really alarming note implying the guide hadn't been updated since 2020 (is that when Mozilla fired everyone?)

Can anyone recommend how I'd find out what has changed in Wasm between 2020 and 2025? Assume I'm targeting wasmtime and can be cutting edge.

So. Creeping along with this. I am posting tihs from a bus.

Learned some more about "textual WASM". Two things I learned. One. It is LISP but also it is Forth. You write it as structurally an S-expression but the commands you write in that S-expression are, as it happens, instructions to a stack machine. This surprised me, but apparently Hotspot was a stack machine, as was the C# CLR as it was based on Hotspot, as is wasm because it was based on… Hotspot. Apparently this works well for JIT.

Who named it PyTorch and not slop.py

@dgoldsmith A note; when I enter the US, I fly into the US through Toronto Pearson airport, in which case you do customs clearance on the Pearson side. This places significant practical bounds on *how* badly customs can treat you.

Guaranteed Whales